Elisha’s Bones (34 page)

Espy stands back, allowing me to savor the moment awhile longer before bringing me back to the matter at hand.

“How are we going to get out of here?”

Instead of answering, I set our precious cargo to the side, crouch down, and place my shoulder against the ossuary.

“Care to give me a hand?”

The two of us strain against the weight of the box and it seems like forever before it moves, just a hair at first, but then a few inches, then a few more. Finally we push the ossuary from its dais, revealing a two-foot-wide hole with a depth of less than four feet.

“Tomb building 101,” I say. “Always have two exits.”

My back hurts as I straighten, and I’m breathing heavily as I scoop up the bones.

“Ladies first?”

“Not on your life.”

The flashlight is worthless, most of its glass parts smashing to pieces on the floor of the larger chamber when I threw myself onto Espy. I hate the thought of entering this exit passage without a light, but this is one of those occasions when complaining accomplishes nothing.

I sit on the edge and then lower myself down, and my head and shoulders are still in the room when my feet touch bottom. It’s cold in here, but at least it’s dry. I crouch and step deeper into the tunnel so that Espy can join me. As we start moving, it doesn’t take long before the light is lost behind us. I feel my way along with one hand, the other holding the treasure we’ve crossed the world to find and are now ferrying with what is probably an inappropriate lack of ceremony.

While shuffling forward, bent at the waist, my foot hits a rough spot and I’m forced to slow down. This far into the tunnel, the darkness is as complete as it’s going to be, and Espy, unaware that I’ve slowed my pace, walks into me just hard enough to send me to my knees.

“Watch where you’re going,” I say.

“Funny.”

Deeper into the tunnel the air is stale and still and I feel sweat beading on the back of my neck, making my shirt stick to my body.

It goes unnoticed at first, but when I recognize that the tunnel is constricting I realize it’s been happening for some time. It’s not much, maybe six inches, yet enough to slow us down.

Stopping, I say, “Keep your hands on the wall.”

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing.” I start off again, content that I’ve not really told a lie because it could very well be the truth. By my foot count, we’ve traveled about fifty yards, and since this passage almost certainly comes up somewhere within the house, it has to reach an end soon. At the rate the tunnel is narrowing, we should be out before it becomes impassable.

A moment later I’m sitting on the tunnel floor and my face feels as if George Foreman hit me, then held me down and rubbed the tender spots with a scouring pad. White dots dance in front of me and I try to blink them away, but they hang tauntingly out of reach. I touch my forehead and wince as fire spreads out from my fingers. It’s sticky, but it doesn’t feel deep. Similar sensations run along my nose and right cheek.

“What happened?” Espy asks.

“I hit something.”

“What?”

What, indeed. I put my legs under me and feel along the ground until I find the bones, still wrapped securely in the cloth. Once I have them I stand and, with my hand straight out in front and at head level, I take a tentative step forward until I’m stopped by solid rock. Like a blind man, I search around for meaning, for shape, and determine that the tunnel has become a crawl space. In the darkness it’s hard to tell the exact dimensions but it’s enough to go in headfirst and shimmy along on my elbows. I release an explosive breath and turn, placing my back against one of the walls.

“There’s a little problem.”

“I’m turning around and going back.”

“The tunnel shrinks just past me. It’s large enough to get through in an army crawl.”

Espy doesn’t respond. After several seconds, I wonder if she was serious and is now making her way back the way we came. I reach out for her.

“Watch it,” she says and slaps my hand away.

“We have to be near the end,” I say in my most reassuring voice.

“You’re going first, and you’re bigger than me. So as long as you don’t get stuck, I guess I’ll be fine.”

“Thanks.”

I feel my way back to the start of the crawl space. After a few deep breaths, I slip in, clutching my cargo like a football. Here, the heat is stifling, and fresh beads of sweat run down my face and my arms as I shimmy forward, scraping my knees and elbows.

I hear Espy following close behind me. I talk to her, to calm her, when my voice catches and I can no longer speak. Before I know what’s happening, the walls of the crawl space close in on me, pinning me within the rock. The stone is like a living, breathing organism, compressing and holding me in its grip. In the dark, fear is a physical thing, with long fingers that can wrap around the heart, an insidious voice that whispers terrible things—hot breath on the ear. I can’t move, can’t even feel where my limbs end and the stone begins. Somewhere deep in my chest is a need that manifests as pain, and it occurs to me that I’m not breathing.

My world is made up of darkness and silence, a sensory deprivation chamber that keeps me from counting the seconds or feeling the pain in my knee. My mind gropes around for an anchor, and I seize on the only image I can conjure: my brother. He’s sunburned, covered with sand, and flashing a raffish grin— the same one he wore when I last saw him alive.

I feel a sob somewhere in my throat, but it won’t come up because I’m locked down and it’s choking me. I think I hear someone calling to me, and I think it might be Esperanza. Yet the sound is fighting a fierce wind to reach me and I lose it on the gusts. I’m buried in sand, pawing at the stuff as it gets in my mouth and in my eyes. I’m calling for help, and I think I hear someone talking to me from above me but it’s unclear. All I know is sand, and that the people up above will not reach me in time.

Whatever this is, it’s killing me. So, with as much effort as I can muster, I force Will from my mind. I push him out, knowing the Will in my head is nothing more than guilt. Guilt is killing me. I seize on the only thing that makes sense; and while my grasp of the idea of God is not a firm one—a tenuous handhold—it’s something that feels safe.

Somewhere along the line, I come to believe that fear has brought its best game. It is roaring like an ocean in my ears and I take as deep a breath as I can and force the sound of waves crashing on rocks to fade. The icy fingers of fear still threaten to wrap around my heart, but I can exercise some control over the air entering and leaving my lungs.

Sweat covers me and I’m shivering. I focus on the idea of God, something I have never latched on to before, and yet it’s all I have right now. I force my hand to move. A small thing.

I hear Esperanza’s voice.

Before I pop the grate up and push it aside, I’m sucking fresher air into my body. The light hurts my eyes, but I refuse to squint against it. Instead, I let it hurt. With leaden arms I pull myself up until I’m sitting on the edge, then swing my legs over and lie on my stomach to help Espy. Once she is out, we both collapse on the dirt.

It’s like a rebirth, this emerging from the hole, and I soak in every sensation.

“What happened in there?” She’s raised herself onto her arm, her face close to mine.

I appreciate the concern in her eyes but we don’t have the time I would need to answer that question. Back in the tunnel, once I could move, it was only a dozen hard-fought yards before the straightaway ended and forced us up. Had I concentrated, before the fear took hold, I would have noticed that the darkness was turning to gray, a subterranean sunrise. But those last yards seemed like a marathon as I processed what happened, this episode that mirrored the one in Quetzl-Quezo. It’s too similar for me to dismiss the claustrophobia theory so easily this time around, yet I know there’s so much more to it than that. Grief, disbelief, anger—too much to think about just now. I wonder, though, at how I latched on to God. Maybe I have more in common with my father than I realize.

My only answer to Esperanza is to lift my head and kiss her, a drive-by. I roll to the side, climb to my feet, and extend my hand. With something between a smile and a look of irritation, she takes it and I pull her up.

I make a mental note to always try to emerge from a scary tunnel into what amounts to a pruned jungle. Exotic flowers, thick vines, and verdant shrubs surround us, and medium-sized trees whose topmost branches brush against the glass ceiling of a greenhouse.

We came out of what must double as a drainage hole. Before we pushed the grate aside, I noticed a trio of smaller drains beneath my feet, to keep water from pooling and trickling back down the tunnel.

We have to be somewhere on the northeast corner of the building, which puts us at the back of the estate. We will have to either cut through it or go around to make it back to the van, assuming the vehicle is still there. I opt for outside, principally because there should be fewer opportunities for someone or something to surprise us.

“Ready to go?”

I clutch the bones to my chest and head out, not waiting for an answer. When I reach a solid wall, I realize we’re not in a true greenhouse, set off from the estate, but a section built into the existing frame, the glass ceiling providing the only light for the thriving plants. I move north along the wall, passing a line of orchids in full bloom. I hear a small gasp from behind me as Espy sees the plants, and I toss a glance over my shoulder to make certain she hasn’t stopped to investigate.

I hit the door at the end with a firm thrust of my forearm, and the controlled air of the estate replaces the warm, humid air of the greenhouse. To the left is a set of double doors and I angle in that direction and push them open. Just as I suspected, we’re in the back, stepping out onto the terrace. I turn right and start running toward the wing on this side. Reaching the far edge, we round the corner on our way to the van. The bones, still wrapped in the purple cloth, thump against my chest as I lope along in the heavy work boots.

When we reach the front, I am cheered to see the van still in its spot. We run toward it, and I feel as light as I can remember feeling, which is a state that comes from achieving the impossible. I’m holding the bones of a biblical prophet, having liberated them from something more daunting than dirt and time.

It’s when I turn my head to smile at Esperanza, to share the conspirator’s nod, that I see the figure emerge from the front door. He has his good arm raised, and he’s sprinting across the stone toward the stairs. We are almost at the van before Victor fires the gun; I hear bullets slam into the side of the vehicle in uniform sequence. I lunge for the passenger door and yank the handle hard enough that I can feel my fingernail start to rip away, and then a mist of blood hits the paint. Espy crumples next to me, her hand slipping from the handle of the sliding door. When I look down, only half registering that Victor is still shooting, I see a small, neat hole in the back of Esperanza’s head. Time seems to slow and I can almost see each individual cavity appear on the side of the van as the Aussie fires another salvo, but the odd thing is that I can’t hear the shots, or the impacts. A growing rumble fills my ears like an angry white noise.

I am a statue, frozen by weariness, and horror, and grief anew. She’s come to rest against the side of the van, her eyes hidden by strands of dark hair. The bullets pop into the van—a staccato death song. Without thinking, my hand goes to the pocket of the borrowed work pants, to the gun that felt uncomfortable beneath me as I crawled through the tunnel.

Turning toward Victor, I see him as he reaches the bottom of the steps. There’s a look on his face that, if I make it out of here, I will never forget. It’s a look of malevolence on a scale of which I wouldn’t have thought another human being capable. I pull the gun from my pocket as Victor raises the one in his hand, and I pull the trigger, knowing I want this man dead, knowing I’m firing with malice equal to his.

My shot misses, but Victor’s is true. The bullet enters my much-abused leg; it burrows through the soft tissue and shatters my kneecap. The impact staggers me back against the van, almost blinds me. Shock is a swift worker, so I don’t feel it when another bullet hits me in the chest. I can see a shadow of Victor coming toward me, and as I drop to my knees I level the gun and squeeze the trigger. The kickback sends the piece falling from my fingers, clattering on the stones.

I must black out then, because I open my eyes at some point and Victor has been dead for at least a few minutes, judging by the pool of blood beneath him. A fire burns somewhere deep in my body as I bleed out, as some vital organ succumbs to the second bullet. I cry out as I try to push away from the van. I catch a glimpse of Esperanza, her face pressed against the van door, blood congealing around the wound that killed her. She’s almost within reach, but I find that I can’t move my legs. Although it’s growing harder to draw breath, there’s enough left in me to release the strangled noise that has gathered in my chest.

A wave of grief strikes me, a hot and curdling feeling that wrenches my muscles and makes my stomach roil. I feel as if I’m going to throw up. The bones lie on the ground, somewhere on the stones, but I can’t look away from Espy. All at once I am hit with a range of emotions I cannot hope to decipher, except to understand that the prong of anger is sharpest. I embrace the emotion, let it wash over me, and it shoots to the surface with such force that I know it’s been with me for a long time—an old friend that I’ve known under an assumed name.

Esperanza’s face is ashen white, growing cold. I want to pull her to me but it’s an impotent desire, and for the first time in my adult life I begin to cry. For the immensity of loss. For the anger that is like a second flesh. For never holding on to anything so tightly that it would kill me to lose it.

I did not cry at Will’s funeral. I’ve carried that guilt around with me.

I’m crying not just for Espy but for Will, too. And, to be honest, I’m also crying for myself.