Blind Descent

"We?"

"Oscar and the others stayed back with Curt and the woman. Finding Mrs. McCarty won't get you off the hook. The superintendent is not pleased. If there's a regulation in NPS-9 you failed to break, I've yet to find it."

After the words "Oscar's with Curt and the woman," A

"Oscar's involved," she said. "We've got to get back."

Laymon looked at her, then at the ruin behind her. "Surely not Oscar," he said, but she could see the idea was not completely foreign to him.

"I think Brent made a halfhearted attempt to silence Frieda, then backed off," A

Laymon looked weary, and every day of his sixty years showed. "All you have is a theory, A

"Oscar's the cave resource manager. Oscar closed this wing of Lechuguilla."

"For the safety of the cave and the cavers. I concurred with the closure."

"Oscar stomped the scene of Brent's shooting and carried away the shell."

Laymon said nothing. He sat on a finger of dead gray concrete that spilled out from the mass trashing the lake. Shoulders stooped, he flicked at the mud on his boot tops with one glove. "I sent a law-enforcement ranger. Oscar stopped him and went himself. I wrote it off as overzealousness. Everybody wants to play cop." He raised his head. "Present company not excluded. By your Wonder Woman act you endangered yourself, Curt Schatz, the resource, and those of us who've had to come after you. Since you didn't see fit to report any of your suspicions to the superintendent and myself, who did you work with? Or are you foolish enough to be working solo?"

"I told you I thought Frieda had been murdered," A

Laymon waved that away with an a

The implied insult stung. The momentary sting of the lash covered up something else, a mild but gnawing sense of unease. A

"We do," he agreed, but he didn't move. He smiled. "Give an old man a chance to catch his breath. I'm an army brat, used to moving around, but I've done way too much of it these past few hours. I'm pooped."

Uneasiness grew. Half-formed ideas fluttered batwings in A

On the heels of these ugly thoughts came others: Laymon knew Oscar was heavy-footed; Holden had joked about it. Oscar might not have gone to Big Manhole on his own, but at Laymon's order. The "chewing out" Jewel reported wasn't something she'd witnessed but something she'd been told-by George Laymon. The rifle shell had been turned over to Laymon for delivery to the sheriff's office. Even the order closing the cave had come down from Laymon. Prior to the rock slide in Katie's Pigtail, Brent had spoken to someone outside the core group. Brent had placed a call on the landline. To Laymon? And Laymon had told him to finish what he started or lose his girls to Amy and her dentist?

The rapid-fire thought ended. Tired unto stupidity, A

"What was in it for you?" A

"Money. A whole lot of money."

"Oscar isn't with Curt and Sondra, is he? Nobody is."

"Smart girl," Laymon said. "Too much smarts isn't healthy in a woman."

A

Throwing dignity to the wind, A

An explosion, intensified by the closed space, knifed through her eardrums. A piece of flowstone the size of a fist vanished from the rock by her left knee. The air shivered with a faint tinkling as of distant wind chimes: crystal trees trembling in the echo of the blast, and the high-pitched singing of rock and ricochet. Laymon had a gun. That possibility hadn't crossed her mind. On the surface it would have been one of her first considerations. Firearms didn't seem part of this world. "Whither thou goest, I shall go." A

Like Br'er Rabbit, A

With each movement she made came the sound of pursuit, always right at her heels. So close, she looked for Laymon's light, expected his breath on the nape of her neck. The sidepack caught and dragged. In the long belly-crawl before the halfway point, the strap snagged and held her fast. Unhooking it, she squeezed on, sans water, food, surveyor's tape, and batteries.

Gone too was the insistent shuffle of her pursuer. The sounds that had driven her to the point at which heart and lungs threatened to burst were made by the contents of her pack shifting close to her ears.

Reaching the room with two leads, where Brent had cut off Frieda's return, A

Having squeezed fifteen feet into the rocky maze, A