“You’ll be fine. You’re letting it stress you out. It’s a head trip,” Rob said.
“I’m also afraid of what we might find if we look around.”
“Then, honey, let’s not look around. Let’s do something just for us.”
“But we planned …”
“I’m not saying never. Just how about not tonight? Let’s have conversations and activities that don’t involve death.”
“Okay,” I said, trying to smile brightly, feeling my face stretch all the wrong ways as I did.
Rob reached across the table and cupped my chin. “You’re going to think I have forgotten her, and I haven’t,” he said. “Okay. We’ll take a little look around. Remember, we don’t want to take any risks.”
I knew, though, and so did Rob, how long two minutes could be.
At least, I thought I knew.
9
INTO THE DEEP
In a sturdy little inflatable Odyssey dive boat that probably folded up to the size of a can of tuna, with a motor that probably ran on vegetable oil, Wesley motored us out to the spot he remembered. Sure enough, his big headlamp picked up a reflector buoy instantly. Rob’s map was only insurance …
It was cold, and I’d slipped on my parka and fingerless gloves. This was skiing weather, although everyone was complaining about the absence of snow and hoping it would show up for Christmas Eve in a few days. Going into the water in this weather defied all logic. To pass the moments, I asked Wesley, “What was your best dive ever?”
Without hesitation: “South America. Flooded Mayan ruins of burial caves.”
“Were there still skulls?” I asked.
Rob shot me a look.
“There were still whole people, skeletonized of course, in these beautifully woven baskets as long as a regular coffin,” Wesley said. “Some of those burials were thousands of years old. Big and little. The care given was very moving. Some of the coffins were decorated with masks and long braids of shells and beads.”
“How did they not float away?”
“There were woven nets.”
So if Tabor really had disappeared down the door in the ground to the old boathouse, then the evidence might still be there. He would have devised some way to keep them in place, to make it easy to revisit. As Wesley cut the motor, I looked up at the lights of the Tabor Oaks, where Garrett Tabor lived now—where I had first seen him in the empty penthouse with that poor girl. This was where old Dr. Simon Tabor took his sons, Dr. Andrew and Garrett’s father, Stephen, to play fifty years ago, when the foundations where the Tabor Oaks once stood had been the family’s summer cottages. Here was where they learned to sail and to fish. There was a sand bar where the kids probably swam, and then the water dropped off. That was where they’d sunk the boat. As we patted ourselves down and slipped out of our parkas, I thought: How would I feel?
What if I actually found a person? Would I forget everything and suck in the whole lake?
Wesley dropped the anchor and slipped into the water in his thick dry suit. I envied him his warmth. We had agreed that he’d stop when Rob and I were two-thirds of the way down. He’d let us go by ourselves to maximize the independence of our experience of the dive. The moon was high and the water in the cover as still and dark as tea.
After buckling on my weights and carefully fitting my dive boots into my fins, I banished all thoughts of the ferocity of the deep. Lake Superior, I told myself, was like New York City: a giant place of small neighborhoods. This neighborhood was a just a corner: it had a small grocery and … and a flower shop and a used bookstore. It would be fine. Although it wasn’t embraceable, like Ghost Lake or The Little Cauldron, it was friendly. Wesley dropped his anchor as Rob and I clung to the side of the little inflatable.
“Are you ready, honey?” Rob said, snapping his tiny Gladiator underwater camera to the outside of his weight belt.
“As I’ll ever be,” I said, meaning that.
We put on our masks and snorkels—and after one last good breath, we dropped away, supple as dolphins. Suddenly I felt good. Rob could be right. This was just a Rob-and-Allie adventure, a Christmas treat. Down we went, carefully adjusting the pressure in our ears, meeting Wesley in a circle of brightness to give him the high sign. Then we dropped more, ten feet, and another ten. I glanced at my watch. Just thirty-five seconds.
Rob began snapping photos of the glorious nursery for lake wildlife, sunnies and pike and the promised sturgeon, as long as my body and as big around as my waist. We dared to glide past the boat wreck to the caves under the cliff. It was harder then—water dark as hematite. It was hard not to think. But I didn’t think. I let my eyes take the place of my mind, reaching up to switch my headlamp to the next higher beam, only dimly aware of the growing urge to breathe. I pointed to the pilings that must once have formed the foundation of the Tabors’ old boathouse. Rob snapped a picture of me. Then, what looked like smears of dark paint were the natural mouths of caves in the cliffs. I moved gently in front of Rob, into the opening of one of the larger ones, half made of natural stone, half capped with a sort of little cornice that had once been an old brick window opening or something. I could feel from my lungs that we were closing in on ninety seconds. There wasn’t much time left.
The caves were filled with other creatures: moon-bright spiders and striders, fish quick and pale as needles. A moment later, with Rob close behind me, I came to a man-made wall, the remnant of a concrete structure, not the back of the cave. To the right, there was a lake-born corridor. I turned to glance down it, knowing I would have to turn back fast and soon begin our ascent.
Immediately, I glimpsed the dull glow of something that wasn’t natural. It was man-made metal: a chain, a big, thick chain, of the kind people used to secure boats.
There was a link and some bright, floating thread.
I pulled the chain and it slipped in space toward me. At the end of the chain was an object. The long, bright floating thread thickened and spread, around her forehead, marbled and blue, threads of skin, an expanse of bone, great holes where eyes had been, but teeth, still perfect, parted in a cry.
10
CAVE DWELLERS
Everything happened so fast then.
While I would never be able to forget the next thirty seconds, I would never really be able to remember them, either.
When I saw the first skull, my Allie-mind came roaring back into my free-dive consciousness, and I almost exhaled. From the small explosions of pin lights bursting beside me, I could tell Rob was taking pictures. He was right there with me, witnessing everything I was witnessing. Tears spurted from the corners of my eyes behind my mask.
So close now.
Keep it together.
I could not lose it.
Think of nothing.
But you can’t go back to thinking of nothing, from thinking of something.
I will not lose it, I thought.
That is the best way to lose it.
I will end up down here with them forever because I’ll blow a circuit in my brain.
But I didn’t. I summoned the person my mother calls “Alexis,” my given name—whom I have come to think of as the child I once was or the woman I would be. Knowing that Rob was capturing this on film, and that we were both fully present, I was bursting with the need to breathe but able to hold it off just for a few seconds more. I let myself think: Here it is. This is the proof you wanted. This is what Garrett Tabor hid. He did not want you to find it, or maybe he did want you to find it. This is why Juliet died. She knew all this. You must know it, too.
I looked.
Ten seconds can be a long time. It can be long enough.
There were four girls chained to the wall. Remnants of clothing clung to delicate arms still articulated, wrist to elbow, young shoulder to bony breast. They swept their rags from side to side like finery as they twisted and turned in their shackles. In my centered brain, they appeared to be dolls dancing, or puppets trying to cast off their strings. Rob tappe
d me from behind. There was no way he could squeeze in next to me. I would need to back out, or turn and exit, to make way for him.
Once in a while, I thought of the extraordinarily sane-beyond-her-years self every chronically sick kid is supposed to be as Alexis Lin Kim. I thought of my ordinary self as Allie.
Alexis, I thought. Stop. Stop, Alexis. In your life, you will touch dead people, not as a pathologist would, but as an evidence technician would. You will be around them. You promised to let them tell you their secrets. Like these girls, those dead people will be in chains—if not real chains, then the chains of circumstance. They need you to speak for them, because they can’t speak anymore. They need you to find the marks and cuts and bits of tissue and material that will tell the stories they would tell.
Remembering my own self just little more than a month ago, sitting in the car screaming after I had stolen the poncho, I recognized that girl again: here tonight, almost as though I could reach out and put my arms around her. Alexis Lin Kim said to poor Allie, “I know, this sucks.”
The pictures would be enough to prove everything. Anything I touched would be ruined. That’s the first rule of … well, anything, from crime to archaeology.
But then I saw it.
On the bobbing neck of the first girl—the one with the long, long blonde tassels of hair, knotted somehow, like dreadlocks—I caught a hint of something that gleamed in the beam of my headlamp.
It was a delicate necklace with a little charm.
The chain still held by the slimmest thread. It had been driven through a piece of what looked like some sort of red wool fabric, once maybe a sweater. Every current seemed to beg it away. So I reached out and tugged, and when it came loose, I glanced down at it. The charm was embossed with a hieroglyph or symbol fashioned out of gold. There was a muted sound. When I looked up, I almost screamed.
Her forehead tapped my facemask. We were so close to each other we could have kissed.
Another girl had slipped forward.
Five.
Dark-haired and fair, this one, oh no, oh hell, she still had skin, porous and pink as a baby’s bath sponge. The swell of the water tipped her chin up.
Where her eyes were, there were crabs.
Alexis Lin Kim, be calm! screamed my head.
No, said Allie.
I had to go. I had to go right then.
Turning to Rob, and signaling my intention, I began to kick for the surface. He didn’t follow. Impossible. I could not be seeing Rob, limp, unresponsive, hanging in the water like a coat on a pole.
But that was what I was seeing. Rob was in fact sinking, deeper, the twenty additional feet toward the lake bottom.
Forcing myself to ignore the need to breathe was like running back into a burning house. I reversed my direction, grabbed Rob, and—holding him with the fabric of his hood bunched in my fist—began to pull both of us toward the surface. There was the cord, the anchor cord that would lead to Wesley.
Shoving the little pendant inside my sleeve, I freed a hand. My lungs were coals, my brain firing fragmented fireworks. I pulled on the cord. I pulled again.
In the eternity of a single second it took for me to kick my way up to Wesley and for him to climb his way down to me, I tried not to think how heavy and inert Rob felt. I glanced at his face. His lips were dark. I drew back and kneed Rob in the chest.
Then, Wesley was forcing his buddy regulator between Rob’s lips, sharing his own regulator with me, as we all hung, like fish on a stringer, along the braided yellow nylon lifeline, gulping air, inflating ourselves with sustaining oxygen. Rob’s eyes fluttered, and he began to wrestle his way out of Wesley’s grasp. He was bullishly strong and horribly pale. In that instant, nothing mattered but that he was alive.
I would have risked my life for him.
My mother was right.
I had risked my life for him.
Disoriented, probably not knowing at all where he was, Rob began to flail side to side, more powerful than either Wesley or me. As he thrashed in this silent-movie shot in the dark water, he opened his hand. I saw something slip from his glove, and I opened my mouth in a silent roar of protest. It was Rob’s little Gladiator: the camera that had captured the truth, tumbling away to the floor of the lake. I turned my headlamp down but could not catch sight of it. I was in no condition to attempt another free dive, but how could I let it get away? I prepared to take another breath and then go down after it.
Wesley held me firmly. He nudged me, urgently pointing toward the surface. More than anything, we needed to get Rob to help.
When we broke through, I gasped for breath. Rob remained conscious. In spite of everything, I was close to calm. Rob is alive. Wesley let down the ladder, and we all heaved into the little Odyssey.
“What happened?” Wesley said once he’d fired up and was zipping back toward the beach. I’d never seen him so rattled. “Did Rob faint? I don’t scare easy, but a DWB is usually lethal. I’m glad you were with him, and you kept your head.”
Trust Wesley to use some outdoorsy acronym at a time like this.
“I don’t know,” I managed between gulps of air. “We went to the mouth of the one of the caves in the cliff, behind the ruins of the sunken boats and the boat house. And Wesley, down there, we saw …” Rob moaned and grabbed my hand. “Are you okay, honey? Does it hurt anywhere?”
Rob made a throat-cutting motion and pointed up at the rapidly approaching windows of the Tabor Oaks. Several of the condominiums had lavishly trimmed trees on the balconies. They stood up hale and brave, like the stout little blue spruce Angie and I had decorated last week for our own living room—a place I wished I were right now. Some of the sliding doors up there were framed in twinkle lights, and a belt of red fairy lights went around the roof, where Juliet, Rob, and I had stood once, so long ago.
He lived there.
Garrett Tabor was near.
He was near to his harem of dead brides.
Near me.
He may have lived in the apartment where the Cryers used to live, the place where I babysat for a few months. Although Dr. Stephen owned the building and he would have painted and cleaned, nothing is ever really, really gone, so Garrett Tabor’s molecules rubbed against my own every day. Except for the penthouse, which—I now saw as I glanced up—had been for sale. The Cryers’ was the only vacant place in the building. Garrett Tabor would have had no need of a four-bedroom penthouse. He had to live there. That’s what Rob meant.
While I was supposedly the intuitive one, Rob got something that I hadn’t understood until now. A chill that had nothing to do with the icy wind and my freezing wet suit crept down past my tongue and swallowed my words, along with the iron tang of lake water.
Wesley had unzipped Rob’s suit, pulling off the top portion, and had laid two of the warm blankets he’d brought in a thermal bag over Rob’s shoulders. I struggled out of my own wet suit and, shivering, huddled in one of the blankets and pulled a stocking cap over my head.
Wesley had his gloves off and his phone out of his waterproof gear bag. “It’s only eleven, and he’s probably put in a full day with the ski team, but he’ll get up. Yep. There’s the light.” I heard the muffled sound of a voice on Wesley’s phone. “Gary! Hey, man, it’s Wesley Krauss. To you, too, buddy, but here’s the thing. I’m approaching the beach down west of your parking lot in a rubber Odyssey with two free divers, kids. Yes. Rob Dorn and Allie … yes, Allie. Sure, you know them. I have been training them. Rob had an incident out there. No, he absolutely is completely conscious, no signs of that I can see … Okay. That’s great, man. About one minute out.”
Turning to us, Wesley explained that Gary Tabor was summoning an ambulance and would do “triage” himself—was even now, healer that he was, grabbing more blankets, a thermos of warm fluid, and a blood pressure cuff.
I blinked at Wesley. Of course he would have called “Gary.” That was the logical thing to do. I felt sick in the same way as when I’d encountered “Gary” at
the morgue.
“Rob,” I called over the sound of the motor and the water. “Are you okay?” Weakly, he gave me the thumbs-up sign. I leaned close to his ear. “Did you see them? Did you see the chains? Did you see the bodies?”
I knew from Rob’s eyes when he opened them wide and his mouth formed an uncomprehending gape, he didn’t see a thing. It was not possible, but I was still alone.
As we smacked into the spit of beach, the velocity of the wind hit, and an ambulance and fire truck peeled into the parking lot. Lights flipped on in the condominiums; firefighters called up assurances that this was an accident, that all was well, there was no fire. The paramedics lifted Rob out of the Odyssey. Laying him gently on a flexible stretcher, they trotted for the open bay doors of the ambulance, and tugging off my fins, I ran across the pebbled, cold sand after him. Garrett Tabor appeared around the edge of one of the open doors.
“You got this?” he said, as though he was one of the medics.
“We’re good.”
“Hi, Allie,” he said. “Always an adventure, huh?”
I said nothing. Wesley and Garrett Tabor bro-hugged, and Wesley helped me out of my wet suit and held up a rubber sheet while I slipped out of my bathing suit and into the warm sweats I’d packed. The thought of Garrett Tabor on the other side of an envelope-thick bit of rubber, the only material that separated him from my naked body, caught me in the gut. I leaned on Wesley and vomited hot sour nothing in the sand.
“Let me look at her,” Tabor said, approaching me with his stethoscope.
I screamed. “No!”
Wesley said, “She’s just freaked out, man.”
Tabor backed off, palms outward. “It’s okay, Allie.”
I reached up to turn off my miner’s light before pulling off my hood, as Wesley shook out my wet suit.
We saw it fall at the same moment, like a golden tear against the pale sand. The little pendant on its broken chain fell from the sleeve of my wet suit. If you didn’t know Garrett Tabor for what he was, you would not have seen the lurch of his shoulders, the involuntary near-lunge to snatch up the prize he so clearly recognized. But I went first. With nothing to fear except everything, I reached down and closed my cold hand around its cold surface, slipping it into the zipped hip pocket of my sweats.