Dead Secret Read Free Page B

Neva wanted to take up caving again after her true near-death experience in this very cave system. Being wedged in a crevasse between rocks, with gravity pulling her ever tighter into the squeeze, had been a frightening experience. But Neva showed a remarkable determination to get over the trauma. She was wide-eyed and pale the first few times back in a cave, but she stuck with it. Diane wondered if it was as much for Mike as for caves.
    “What’s up?” Neva looked up at the opening until the light disappeared with Mike down the tunnel. She grinned, and Diane watched her face change as she turned her head and spotted the remains.
    “My God, that’s not anyone we know . . . ?”
    “No. This guy’s been here a very long time.”
    “What happened to him?”
    “I don’t know. I can’t see enough of his bones to tell, but I’d bet he broke a limb, probably a leg. Looks like he was a caver. Has a helmet with a carbide lamp, a canteen, and I just noticed a backpack sticking out from under him. But I haven’t seen any rope. I don’t know of any caver who would venture this far into a cave without rope.”
    “Novice?” Neva said, squatting to look at the mummy and his artifacts.
    “Maybe, but novices usually bring rope—sometimes not enough of it, but they usually have it.”
    “What do you want me to do?”
    “We can’t touch the body until the coroner arrives, but we can do a grid search of the floor.”
    “What about the breakdown?”
    “We’ll get Mike to help with some of it.”
    “You’re kidding. You’re going to look under the rocks?”
    Diane surveyed the piles of rocks on the floor. “We’re not going to move them all, but I’d like to see if anything is under the rocks that just fell. You take that end; I’ll start at the wall with the opening.” She gestured toward the hole in the opposite wall. “We’ll meet in the middle.”
    Diane and Neva made their way to opposite sides of the room, but instead of searching the floor, Diane looked up at the opening in the wall.
    “I think he fell from here,” she said. Her words reverberated across the cavern. She doubted Neva could make out what she’d said. Diane waved her away when she saw Neva’s headlamp turn in her direction.
    Diane rubbed a hand over the rough texture of the wall. It was about twenty feet to the opening, not a bad climb. She examined the wall, mentally noting hand- and footholds. Piece of cake, like climbing a ladder. She keyed her radio. “Neva, I’m going up top to the opening here. You can continue searching the floor, or wait for me, whichever you prefer.”
    Diane pulled her chalk bag from her pants pocket, dusted her hands and felt for the first two holds—a crack in the rock face in which she slipped the fingers of her right hand, and a protrusion she grabbed with the other. She proceeded up the face of the cliff, making sure every handhold and foothold was stable before she moved to the next, always using her hands for balance and her legs to push upward.
    Diane liked solo climbing. She enjoyed being free of the ropes, but she always brought a climbing harness just in case she came across something really deep and interesting in the cave.
    When she reached the opening, she pulled herself over the bottom edge, stood up in the newfound tunnel and viewed the cavern from this new vantage point. The scene was beautiful. Illuminated by her headlamps, the varied hues of red, orange, ivory and silver rock had a golden glow. The icy-looking stalactites and stalagmites with their pointed peaks and knobby textures looked like spires from some Middle Earth kingdom. Diane found the unearthly appearance ironic—nothing was more of the earth than a cave.
    She turned her attention to details of the tunnel. Her first thought on examining the rock face she’d just climbed was that Caver Doe, as she dubbed him in her mind, had fallen the twenty feet from this tunnel to the cavern floor. The rock wall had a concave dip in it under