Her foot kicked something. It clattered on its side and rolled away on the floor and she fell to her knees and clamored after the sound. Her fingers connected with an object and she pulled it onto her lap. Plastic. The right size. She traced the hourglass shape with her hands, and moved a fingertip along the handle on top. Shaking with excitement, she moved her attention to the lantern’s base, fumbling around until her fingers located the nickel-sized button. Then she pressed it.
She squinted as the white LED bulb flickered to life. Her eyes watered. She cradled the lantern protectively in her arms, like it was a child. She knew this lantern. The sense of familiarity gave her comfort. It was a Coleman camp lantern, and it was green. Not just any green. It was the color green of sleeping bags and the Green Bay Packers and the Coleman cooler her dad had had when she was a kid. Bliss had bought a Coleman camp lantern at a yard sale to match it. They had given that lantern to her father for his birthday.
The hammering had stopped.
Susan didn’t move.
If she listened hard, she could hear the faint sound of some sort of fan and the distant thrum of water moving through pipes, though that might have just been the blood rushing through her head.
She was underground. She knew that much. She was someplace where no one would ever find her.
There was a mattress. Maybe there was water, too. Maybe Gretchen had left her a hot plate and a selection of Hungry Man soups. Susan lifted the Coleman by the handle to look around, but before she could even stand up, something made her stop. She pulled the lantern closer, to examine it. It could have been anything. It was dirty in there. She was dirty. The lantern was bound to be dirty, too.
The LED bulb illuminated every detail of the handprint on the lantern’s clear plastic globe. The specks of dirt, the whorls of fingertips, laugh line, life line, and the blood that stained the palm and several fingers.
Susan gagged and coughed and lowered the lantern to the floor, and snapped her hand away. Then she extended both her hands, palms down, in front of her, and very slowly, held her shaking hand a few inches in front of the clearest print. They were the same size.
She turned her hands over and held them in the light, knowing, already, what she would find. They were caked with blood and dirt.
Her eyes roamed the perimeter of the light. She didn’t even know what direction she’d stumbled from; she was completely turned around. What was it she had touched? Had it come from the mattress? The wall?
The lantern cast a ghostly flicker in a circle three feet around her. Beyond it, the dark made her eyes hurt. Was there a body in there with her, someone Gretchen had already murdered?
Susan rubbed her palms hard against her thighs, and then wrapped her arms around her knees and hugged herself. She could feel her heartbeat pounding in her chest so hard it felt like her rib cage might split. She made herself inhale a deep lungful of rank air, then exhaled and concentrated on slowing her heart.
Go to your calm blue ocean, Bliss would always say. Like it was easy. Like everyone loved the tropics. Calm blue oceans made Susan think of drowning. Susan had to find something else. She glanced up over her knees.
* * *
Susan held her palms over the Coleman lantern, and pretended it was a campfire. She was camping with her dad. They were in the Trinities, and they were looking up at the stars. Susan could feel the thrumming in her chest slow as she pictured the scene. She kept breathing. They were sitting outside of their tent, on the soft ground. The Coleman was their only source of light other than the stars. Her dad had a book open and he was reading to her by lantern light. Susan closed her eyes and pressed her forehead against her kneecaps. What book was it?
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
Susan half laughed, half sobbed. She knew the first lines by heart.
Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-eight million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.
Susan opened her eyes. This wasn’t right.
This lantern wasn’t like her father’s at all. What had she been thinking? His had been similar, yes, but it had been tin, and fueled by propane. This one was plastic, and …
Her pulse was throbbing again.
Susan leaned forward and flipped the lantern upside down. The light shifted to the floor, illuminating a dirty gray expanse of concrete, but she could still make out the battery compartment on the underside of the lamp. She turned the lamp upright, squinting in its direct light, and turned it in her hands, searching for the answer. She found the sticker near the bottom of the lamp’s base, a few inches below the Coleman logo. Four D cell batteries, it read. Run time: 175 hours.
Susan did the math. That was seven days. If the batteries were fresh. If the bulbs were new. If the sticker was even accurate.
A terrible notion occurred to her: What if she was down here longer than that?
The darkness seemed to press in around her. Susan felt goose bumps rise on her legs and arms.
It was clear what she had to do.
She would have to ration herself. She would have to save the light.
She was in the Trinities, and she was in her tent, and her father was there right beside her, and it was time for bed. They had down sleeping bags. And books to read in the morning. And Bliss had made them terrible trail mix with flaxseeds and when they woke up they were going to feed it to the birds.
“Good night, Dad,” Susan said softly into the darkness, and she put her finger on the lantern’s on/off button and pushed it.
The blackness was absolute. It was somehow darker than it had been before she had even found the Coleman. She had to blink to reassure herself that her eyes were still open. It was like death. It was like her consciousness and her body had been separated. This was what Gretchen did. She terrorized. She tortured. It wasn’t enough that she was going to kill Susan, she was going to make her scared first.
Susan reached for the lantern and turned it back on.
Fuck it. She had never been very good at rationing anything. She pulled her T-shirt over her knees for warmth, scraped a bit of peanut butter off the front of the shirt, and ate it.
Anyway, she wasn’t camping with her dad. Her dad was dead. She wasn’t sure now that they had ever been camping. Maybe she had just seen that tin Coleman in the basement.
Susan hugged her knees and kept her eyes on the edge of the light.
She was on a submarine. She was on a submarine in the deep Pacific, exploring the Mariana Trench. And she was absolutely alone.
CHAPTER
39
The island was a dark shape in the distance. Archie stood next to Gretchen in the thick woods of an undeveloped lakeside property. The trees went right down to the lake’s waterline and were dense enough to obscure the houses on either side of the two-acre lot. The ground was a soft bed of cedar needles and the branches of the hulking evergreens blotted out the stars. They had parked on the side of the road and then Gretchen had led him through the trees with only a small penlight to guide them. He’d tripped on tree roots and fallen twice, but she navigated the woods easily, as if she’d memorized the terrain. She also had the advantage of not being high.
The cold black water of the lake lapped gently at the muddy shore. The dead leaves that lined the bank were soft and fetid, and smelled of rot.
“Where are we going?” Archie asked.
“The one place the police know I’m not,” Gretchen said.
Archie gazed back up at the island. It was a hundred yards away, and he had a feeling they weren’t going to take the bridge. “Are we going to swim?” he asked.
She turned to him. The white of her nurse’s uniform seemed to glow faintly in the dark, making her look almost ghostly. She swung the penlight back into the w
oods and he followed her between the rough trunks until they came to a sort of clearing. Far above them, there was a shred of dark blue where the treetops didn’t entirely cloak the sky. Gretchen aimed the light near the toes of her white pumps.
“Here,” she said. “Clear it.”
Archie looked at the ground she was indicating with the penlight. He could see in the light that the bed of cedar needles had been disturbed. The older, darker needles were mixed in with the lighter, dryer ones. He dropped to his knees and started sweeping the pungent needles aside with his hands, piling them to one side. A few inches below the surface, his palms touched wood. Archie used the forearm of his corduroy blazer to brush the rest of the needles aside, and then he sat back on his heels. The wooden slab that he had revealed was three feet by four feet. The air smelled thickly of cedar. Splinters stung his hands.
“There are two tunnels in,” Gretchen said. “Jack Reynolds’s island? Look on a map, darling. It’s called Runner Island. The old man who built the house in the twenties was a bootlegger. Jack’s interest in the island went beyond an enthusiasm for Tudor architecture. The other tunnel is newer, reinforced, well lit. I assume it’s the one they use for their business. This one is a bit dodgy. I had to pry the door open from the inside. You’re not afraid of spiders, are you?”
Archie looked behind them, through the trees, toward the dark water. “It goes under the lake?” he asked. It had been ten months since he’d pulled Susan’s lifeless body from the floodwaters, but the dark water still gripped at something in his chest.
“You’re not going to drown, darling,” Gretchen said gently.
He believed her. She would not let him drown. He believed her because she had said it, and because he had long ago come to terms with the fact that when he did die, it would be on Gretchen Lowell’s terms. “So how is it going to happen?” he asked her.
She paused. The small circle of light thrown by the penlight in her hand remained at her feet, unmoving. “I haven’t decided yet.”
“Well, that’s comforting,” Archie said.
Gretchen shifted the light to a blocky wooden handle and then bent over and pulled the tunnel door open with a rusty creak. The door slammed onto the ground, filling the air with dust and dirt. They both stood looking at the inky well at their feet. The light of the penlight was swallowed by the darkness. Archie could barely see where solid ground gave way to air, but he thought he saw a ladder descending into the pit.
“After you,” Gretchen said.
Archie had the brief sensation that he was standing next to his own open grave, and then he thought of Susan, shook it off, and felt his way into the hole.
The wooden ladder went straight down. It was ancient and soft with dry rot and splintered under Archie’s hands. He counted the rungs as he descended, each foothold giving slightly under his weight. After twenty, he hit solid ground. He stepped back into the blackness and brushed the splinters from his hands. Gretchen stepped off the ladder next to him. She had the penlight in her mouth and she dropped it into her hand and shone it around the dirt floor until she zeroed in on something and went to it. The space filled with white fluorescent light. Archie blinked for a moment, seeing spots. Then his eyes adjusted. Gretchen was standing in her blood-spattered nurse’s costume holding the handle of a Coleman battery-powered camp lantern. The walls of the pit were rough-hewn rock and dirt, reinforced with decaying timber beams. The air was earthy and dank. A jagged tunnel headed horizontally into blackness.
Something dropped onto Archie’s head and started crawling across his forehead. He flicked it away, without seeing what it was. “Happy Halloween,” he said dryly.
“This way,” Gretchen said, pointing the light to indicate that he should follow her.
The tunnel was just big enough that they could walk side by side, Archie occasionally ducking as his head brushed rotting timber beams. The walls were carved out of rock. The dirt floor was uneven and seemed to slope slightly downward, though Archie couldn’t be sure. The sensation wasn’t Oxycodone related. The temperature dropped the farther they went, until it felt a good fifteen degrees cooler down here than it had been up on the surface. Gretchen’s white stockings and shoes gleamed. Rats scampered at the periphery of the lantern light. Archie could hear them squealing.
“You got to Susan between my house and her mother’s,” Archie said. He was hunched over, hands in his pockets, trying to stay in the light.
“I was watching you,” Gretchen said. “I knew where she’d go once I put that question on her screen, and she showed right up, predictable little thing.”
Archie ducked under another beam. Loose dirt sprinkled from the tunnel’s ceiling, falling on them from overhead like rain. “You must have tampered with her car before everyone else showed up,” he said.
“Even an old Saab has a computer,” Gretchen said, brushing the dirt from her shoulders. “I hacked the electronic control system of her car, and then I was able to control the car’s computer wirelessly from a laptop.” She touched his elbow. “Watch this rock,” she said, shining the lantern in front of him, to illuminate a rock in his path the size of a lunchbox. Archie stepped around it.
“The car’s computer controls the radio,” Gretchen continued. “The horn. The engine. It’s really quite amazing. Susan doesn’t vary her route from your house, you know. I didn’t even have to follow her. I went ahead, and waited. And then I offered her a ride.” She smiled. “I think I might have frightened her.”
Another rat darted from the light. The ceiling spit more dirt in Archie’s hair. “So you drove her somewhere,” Archie said. He was trying to puzzle out what time Susan had left his apartment, how far Gretchen could have gotten with her in order to make it back to his house when she did. He thought that Susan had left between ten and ten-thirty. Gretchen had shown up just past one A.M.
“I’ll save you the math, darling,” Gretchen said. “I had almost three hours to take her somewhere and get back to you,” she said. “And I’ll give you a hint, I didn’t drug her.”
“You needed her mobile,” Archie said. He searched the tunnel floor ahead of them for signs of footprints. Gretchen had been down here before—maybe Susan had been her first guest. But the uneven ground threw too many shadows for Archie to make out any trace of disturbed ground.
“No one comes down here anymore,” Gretchen said idly. “Jack and his people don’t use these parts of the tunnels.”
“I wonder why,” Archie said.
Archie ducked under another timber support beam that had disintegrated to cobwebs and splinters, and tried not to think about the ten thousand pounds of pressure from the lake pressing to get in.
They kept going, advancing in silence, Archie’s mind busy trying to figure out if Susan was really somewhere down there, or if Gretchen just wanted him to think that Susan was down there somewhere so that he’d trudge along obediently beside her. Occasionally he glanced around at the darkness that filled in behind them. It was complete black, like the world was evaporating with each of their steps, disintegrating into nothingness. Archie remained close to Gretchen. He didn’t want to risk stepping outside of the light.
“I have a surprise for you,” Gretchen said.
Gretchen’s surprises were never good. “Will it use up my health insurance deductible?” Archie asked.
“It’s a gift,” Gretchen said, picking up her pace. “You’ll like it.”
Archie hurried along beside her. “I don’t want any more presents.”
“Guess what it is,” Gretchen said.
Was it an illusion, or was the tunnel getting smaller? “What what is?” he asked.
“The present,” Gretchen said.
There was only black space up ahead, no way to see how far they had to go, if this tunnel ever ended. “I’m not really in the mood for games,” Archie said. He was breathing hard. The tunnel air was light on oxygen.
“What do you like to do best of all?” Gretchen asked. She stopped and lifted the la
ntern, illuminating both of their faces.
Archie raised a hand to shade his eyes. “I give up,” he said.
“Catch killers,” she said brightly.
Archie dropped his hand and gazed at her in incomprehension. The light carved dark shadows into her face, sharpening each angle. “You’re turning yourself in?” he asked.
“No,” she said. She lowered the lantern. “Don’t be silly, darling.” She turned on her shiny white heel and started moving again, and Archie found himself instantly enveloped by darkness. Rocks crunched under his feet as he struggled to catch up with her.
They continued in silence again, so that the only sounds were the rats, the gravel under their feet, and the distant menacing whisper of the lake moving over their heads.
“There,” Gretchen said finally.
She aimed the light straight ahead, where the tunnel ended at a thick wooden door set in a concrete wall. They had come to the end of the line.
“It sticks,” Gretchen said. “We’ll both have to push.”
Archie didn’t argue. Wherever that door led, he was confident he would like it more than the tunnel he was standing in. He put his shoulder against the warped wood and leaned into it as Gretchen turned the rusty knob. With the only other exit back the way they had come, Archie gave it his all, inhaling a century’s worth of dust and cobwebs in the process. It took three body slams before the door gave way, and he tumbled through the doorway in a cloud of dirt, barely getting his hands out in front of him in time to break his fall as he toppled into darkness. The first thing he noticed was that the floor on the other side was hard. He got to his feet, palms stinging, shoulder aching, coughing up dust, as Gretchen came through the door behind him with the light. They were standing at the intersection of two concrete passageways. Archie shook the cobwebs off his blazer, thumbed the dust from his eyes, and glanced around. This wasn’t like the pseudo-mine-shaft they’d just come through; this was a basement.