Reprisal (10 page)

After she'd wakened--having slept in her sleeping bag under a mile of stone, alone on a patch of fine drift gravel in darkness deeper than dark--Joanna'd filter-pumped icy water from a small silver pool no one had seen since the world began. She'd drunk a quart of that stone-tasting water and eaten a protein bar and half a carbohydrate bar ... then checked her equipment pack, her rope coil, lamp batteries, and gear. She'd sorted through everything, making sure nothing was lost, nothing would be left behind. ...

She climbed from the graveled passage by a breezy squeeze, snaking up into it behind her helmet light's shifting yellow beam, feeling cool wind drafting down from chambers, crawl spaces beyond.

She started working her way up this narrow chimney that grew slowly narrower

... climbed and twisted, writhed her way up, the equipment pack and rope coil--tethered with four feet of webbing--dragging up beneath her. The chimney took an awkward turn, up and to the right, and Joanna tried the turn ... got into it with her right arm cramped down along her side as she pushed herself slowly higher. It was very hard work, because only that right hand--its leather glove worn through, so she was bleeding--only that hand and the toe of one boot had any purchase at all.

She moved up very slowly, her right side wedged in the angle of the stone. ...

Then moved more slowly; she could feel her boot toe scrabbling, scraping on the rock beneath her. ... Then she couldn't move anymore. Couldn't take a deep breath, she was held so tight.

Joanna began to lie to herself--that she could keep climbing, that she was just resting because it was a hard vertical squeeze and now angling off, and she was lucky she was climbing ... not caught crawling head down. Joanna lied to herself for several minutes, and pretended she was resting.

But the lie wouldn't last, and she had to try to move--not move up or down, just move a little, ease herself in the chimney so she could get a deep breath. A breath was really what she needed. ... She'd crawled up, so there must be a way down. Or perhaps of continuing up. Plenty of choices, if she could get a really deep breath. There was no use wasting little breaths in grunting, murmuring for help, letting them know she was in trouble. No use in that. There was no "them."

And if she failed--couldn't get just one deep breath to start with; that would help so much--then no one would ever know where Joanna Reed was held, gripped, smothered in a million-ton coffin of stone. Someone might smell her one day

... smell faint drifting rot in the cavern's air, and suppose some animal had come down for its own reasons, and died. No man, nor any god there might be, would be able to find her. ... It was, in a way, the place she'd been seeking.

Here, while she slowly writhed and twisted for any purchase--careful, careful not to begin to struggle desperately, to scream out air she would never be able to breathe back--here at last she forgot about Frank, forgot about loss and unhappiness. Here, caught hard and perfectly alone, unable to go up, unable to back down ... caught hard in darkness that her lamp would only demonstrate as its battery slowly died, Joanna forgot about anything but getting out.

Secretly, she traded Frank's death for getting out. That dreadful thing having happened, seemed insurance against this dreadful thing happening. ... And the cowardice calmed her, became very useful, so she breathed slowly out ... and out again to make slight extra space where the stone clamped her so closely.

She decided to go up, not back ... and quarter-inch by quarter-inch--using her chin once, stretching her jaw up against the rock, then slowly bowing her head with all her strength, so her chin caught on rough limestone, she added just that little bit to climbing. Added as much as her trapped right hand ... and she twisted and slowly, slowly corkscrewed an inch ... perhaps two inches higher. Her chest ached from effort where her breast had beeneascar tissue sore across the muscle.

Joanna's left leg was numb; she couldn't feelx. Her left hand was free, but found nothing above her but limestone too wet, too slippery. She used her right boot toe ... her right hand's fingers, and breathed out again and out again, worming, working, writhing up almost another inch ... a cave snake, blind and slowly turning inside stone.

A rage began to grow in her like changing weather --a slow fury against all unmoving things, all things too hard, too solid, real and unchangeable. Stone, and death.

She took rapid small breaths, like the breaths she'd learned in her Lamaze classes years ago--giving-birth breaths that might allow her to live to leave this narrow passage. ... She found that her right hand was doing the most, though it could curl, push against the rock in only a limited way. The hand was being hurt; she felt the stone burning the edge of her palm, wearing skin away as she worked.

Joanna thought for a moment of trying to go back, trying to get down the chimney. If her left hand could grip above her, help her with leverage a little, she might be able to. Without that, not. ... But rage, her anger, seemed to drive her up, drive her to complete what she'd started. She turned and turned her right hand, and felt the stone grow slowly wetter beneath, where the hand was bleeding. Wet, but not too slippery yet. She breathed in little sipping breaths, breathed them carefully out, worked her raw right hand, and scraped and scrabbled her boot toe against the rock beneath her. The scraping there seemed to uncover stone a little rougher than the surface ...

gave her a hint of purchase against it.

She rose an inch ... then another. Her right hand--the side of the palm--felt as if she rubbed it on a hot stove, was scorching, cooking it as she climbed.

The pain made her begin to cry--but only the pain. She wept for no other reason, and kept working.

She twisted, heaved up almost another inch--and felt with her searching left hand at last a chipped place, a tiny notch that misting water had corroded in the chimney's limestone through the centuries. She got a fingernail ... almost a fingertip in it, hooked her hand into a claw and slowly, carefully on that fragile hold, began to lift a little of her weight, only a very little of it.

If that fingernail tore off, she had four more. ...

She wrestled, tugged, then twisted up a little more, and was able to breathe almost deeply. She rested there while feeling came tingling, stinging back into her left leg. ... Then she had both legs, and was able to kick out a little and scramble, was almost free to climb. And in a while, when she was very tired, her left hand found a small round of stone to grip.

Slowly, as she climbed, the chimney began to open. It opened wider, and at last allowed Joanna--dragging her tethered gear up behind her-to haul out onto an easy crawl over mud to an upper passage's rubbled floor. She sat there, satisfied, dug in her pack and replaced her helmet lamp's battery. By bright new light, her watch displayed numbers near noon that made little sense to her until she thought about them, concentrated on them.

She'd been in the chimney almost two hours. And up had been the proper way to go. If she'd tried going back down the squeeze, conformations different, descending, she would have stayed in the stone forever.

... The afternoon was difficult because she was so tired. Too tired, too cold in cool air to map, stretch the tape, check the compass and inclinometer, get the readings right and noted. She rambled through an upper passage that turned and turned again, a maze she committed to memory as she passed, with a veteran caver's noting of lefts and rights, ups and downs. ... She found a side crawl that had a breeze blowing from it, slid into that and down into shallow water, very cold--then stood and waded behind her lamp's light into a small chamber so bright with frost-white tapestries it hurt her eyes. Flashing from reflected water drops, from lacework and white ribbonwork in stone suspended from the little room's high ceiling, her helmet's light doubled and grew brighter in reflection, in rainbow refraction of roses, sulfurs, mauves and old ivory-chryselephantine. Miniature blizzard-white islands lifted from a shallow pool as clear as air, where her lamp's light shone down through perfect water to sparkle from quartzite pebbles on its floor.

No one had ever seen the small glittering room before--and likely no one ever would again. It had been waiting for millions of still and silent years of darkness for some living creature with curiosity and courage to search for it, and discover its loveliness. She had come, and it was hers.

For hours, as Joanna drove east toward the coast, early evening's falling sunlight forest odor seemed elements of a dream, an odd dream of roofless space and green of growing things.-Reality remained the coolness and darkness of the cave.

The cars approaching, then thumping past her, seemed driven by dream figures, two-dimensional, who had no notion how to find their way out of a dark labyrinth of miles of passageway, falls, and faults. No notion of how to do that--then climb four hundred feet of slender line out of a cavern's well of darkness, emptiness. To climb exhausted, stepping up as each ascender--one at her right foot, one at her left knee--slid up the rope in turn, and gripped.

Up forty stories to the light.

... She drove east, the Volvo's trunk full of wet and muddy clothes, boots, mud-streaked coils of Blue Water rope and PMI rope, along with equipment needing cleaning, drying--and for anything steel, a light touch of oil. She'd poured hydrogen peroxide over her right palm where the skin was gone, and that had hurt so much that spots swam before her eyes--tiny water-gray spots moving through a gray field. Then she'd taped on a gauze bandage.

Her legs and shoulders ached from rope climbing. Even with ascenders, four hundred feet was four hundred feet. And her hands were sore--skinned palm, scraped knuckles, fingers bruised from gripping rock. Her hands hurt, cramped around the steering wheel.

... She came in on the nine-thirty ferry, with night unfolding like a bat's wing along the Atlantic's horizon. She drove along Strand, then up Slope Street and into the cottage's narrow graveled drive to the garage.

There were chores to do--the ropes to be hosed, coiled, and hung to dry, and all the other equipment cleaned and put away ... equipment packs and rope sacks turned inside out to air. A couple of hours of chores.

Joanna was too tired, too hungry, to start working right away. She left the garage, went up the cottage's back steps and through the kitchen door, then almost called out that she was home--almost, but caught herself. After a few more weeks, she wouldn't even begin to call into empty houses.

She decided on a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and a glass of milk--put her purse on the kitchen table, and went down the hall to the entryway to check the phone. Its message light was blinking. Rebecca, probably.

Joanna pushed the play button and heard a voice she slowly recognized. Mrs.

Thurman, the president's secretary at White River. Very brisk old lady, and not friendly.

Mrs. Thurman spoke for quite a while, almost ran out the tape. ... The president wanted to get in touch and was very, very sorry. The state police had been unable to contact her at her home in White River, and then her father's attorney, Ms. Dufour from upstate, had called. Terrible accident ...

woodstove door left open. Mrs. Thurman was anxious for Joanna to get back to her at the president's office, so they'd know she'd gotten the message.

Joanna put the phone down with the oddest sense of satisfaction. She felt almost pleased. ... Besides that strange feeling of completion, she felt nothing at all. Felt no surprise, no sorrow, no sense of loss. Nothing more seemed to have been taken from her--as if she were an inner-city storekeeper who'd been robbed in such swift succession that the second theft didn't matter.

She walked back to the kitchen, and opened the refrigerator to take out the peanut butter, whole wheat bread, and jar of blackberry jam. She put those on the counter by the stove, then opened the refrigerator again to get the milk.

Barkley's sold only whole milk.

She took a knife from the counter drawer and began making her sandwich. Peanut butter first, on the left-hand slice. Jam would be on the other slice--and not too heavy on the jam, or it would sugar over the taste of the peanut butter.

... She supposed she would have to consider her father not only dead, but burned to death--as Frank was not only dead, but drowned.

It seemed to Joanna, relaxed in emptiness, that there must be a fact, a truth hiding, that explained it all. And to discover that truth? To explore these odd coincidences--Frank's improbable blunders at sea, her cautious father's carelessness with his woodstove--to search beneath, to map that dark labyrinth

... who better?

The Lake Chaumette Fire Department-volunteer--had sent its captain, Milt Duffield, out to meet Joanna at the cabin site. The fire captain, large and lumpy in slacks, jacket, shirt and tie, andwitha baby's chubby earnest face, had been waiting when Joanna pulled into the cabin clearing after half a day's traveling up from the island.

The sun threw long shadows while they walked around a very large square shallow pit filled with charred planks, chunks of debris, and fragments floating on black water. A bitter smell drifted up ... wafting on the lake breeze.

"We pumped from the lake," the fireman said when Joanna asked about the water.

"But way too late. It was goin' too good for us to do anything about it, except keep it from startin' up the woods."

"You didn't find my father. ..."

"Found his bones," the fireman said. "Some of his bones."

It seemed to Joanna that Captain Duffield --volunteer or not--must have dealt with relatives of the dead before. He was calmly matter-of-fact, no comments or posturing about loss.

"And it was the woodstove?" The early evening was growing darker, with clouds reaching west, in from the sea.

"Yes, Mrs. Reed; it was. I knew your dad, just to see him at the store, and he was gettin' pretty old to be out here alone. Tendency is to get forgetful, careless, that age."

"My father was a very careful man."