She coughed, looked at her cigarette with distaste, and buried it with the others in the overfilled ashtray, where it smoldered balefully.
“You know why we happened to end up in Marysville? George had the idea he was going to raise alpacas. After they died, which didn’t take long, it was going to be goldendoodles. If you don’t know, goldendoodles are a cross between golden retrievers and poodles. You think eeva-lution ever approved of a mix like that? I goddam doubt it. His brother put the notion in his head. No greater fool than Roger Bolton ever walked the earth, but George thought their fortunes was made. Roger moved down here with his family and the two of em went partners. Anyway, the goldendoodle pups died, just like the alpacas. George and me were a little tight for money after that, but we had enough to get by. Roger, though, he poured his whole savings into that damn fool scheme. So he looked around for work and . . .”
She stopped, an expression of amazement dawning on her face.
“What about Roger?” Ralph asked.
“Damn,” Lovie Bolton said. “I’m old, but that’s no excuse. It was right in front of my face.”
Ralph leaned forward and took one of her hands. “What are you talking about, Lovie?” Going to her first name, as he always eventually did in the interrogation room.
“Roger Bolton and his two sons—Claude’s cousins—are buried not four miles from here, along with four other men. Or maybe ’twas five. And those children, of course, them twins.” She shook her head slowly back and forth. “I was so mad when Claude got six months in Gatesville for stealing. And ashamed. That’s when he started using drugs, you know. But I saw later it was God’s mercy. Because if he’d been here, he would have been with them. Not his dad, by then George had already had two heart attacks and couldn’t go, but Claude . . . yes, he would have been with them.”
“Where?” Alec asked. He was leaning forward now, staring intently.
“The Marysville Hole,” she said. “That’s where those men died, and that’s where they remain.”
10
She told them it had been like the part in Tom Sawyer when Tom and Becky get lost in the cave, only Tom and Becky eventually got out. The Jamieson twins, just eleven years old, never did. Nor did those who tried to rescue them. The Marysville Hole took them all.
“That’s where your brother-in-law got work after the dog business failed?” Ralph asked.
She nodded. “He’d done some explorin there—not in the public part, but on the Ahiga side—so when he applied, they hired him on as a guide quick as winkin. Him and the other guides used to take tourists down in groups of a dozen or so. It’s the biggest cave in all of Texas, but the most popular part, what folks really wanted to see, was the main chamber. It was quite a place, all right. Like a cathedral. They called it the Chamber of Sound, because of the what-do-you-call-em, acoustics. One of the guides would stand at the bottom, four or five hundred feet down, and whisper the Pledge of Allegiance, and the people at the top would hear every word. Echoes seemed to go on forever. Also, the walls were covered with Indian drawings, I forget the word for em—”
“Pictographs,” Yune said.
“That’s it. You got a Coleman gas lamp when you went in, so you could look at em, or up at the stalactites hangin down from the ceiling. There was an iron spiral staircase that went all the way to the bottom, four hundred steps or more, around and around and around. It’s still there, I shouldn’t wonder, although I wouldn’t trust it these days. It’s damp down there, and iron rusts. Only time I took them stairs, it made me dizzy as hell, and I wasn’t even lookin up at the stalactites, like most of em. You want to believe I took the elevator back to the top. Goin down is one thing, but only a pure-d fool climbs up four hundred steps if she don’t have to.
“The bottom was two, maybe three hundred yards across. There were colored lights set up to show off all the mineral streaks in the rocks, there was a snack bar, and there were six or eight passageways to explore. They had names. Can’t recall all of them, but there was the Navajo Art Gallery—where there were more pictographs—and the Devil’s Slide, and Snake’s Belly, where you had to bend over and even crawl in places. Can you imagine?”
“Yes,” Holly said. “Oough.”
“Those were the main ones. There were even more leadin off from them, but they were closed off, because the Hole isn’t just one cave but dozens of em, goin down and down, some never explored.”
“Easy to get lost,” Alec said.
“You bet. Now here’s what happened. There were two or three openins leadin away from the Snake’s Belly passageway that weren’t boarded over or barred up, because they were considered too small to bother with.”
“Only they weren’t too small for the twins,” Ralph guessed.
“That’s the nail, sir, and you hit it on the head. Carl and Calvin Jamieson. Couple of pint-sizers lookin for trouble, and they sure found it. They were with the party that went into Snake’s Belly, right behind their ma and pa at the end of the line, but not with em when they came out. The parents . . . well, I don’t have to tell you how they took on, do I? My brother-in-law wasn’t the one leadin the group the Jamieson family was a part of, but he was in the search party that went after em. Headed it up would be my guess, although I have no way of knowin.”
“His sons were also part of it?” Howie asked. “Claude’s cousins?”
“Yessir. The boys worked part-time at the Hole themselves, and came on the run as soon as they heard. Lots of folks came, because the news spread like wildfire. At first it looked like it wasn’t going to be no problem. They could hear the boys callin from all the openins leadin off from the Snake’s Belly, and they knew exactly which one they went into, because when one of the guides shone his flashlight, they could see a little plastic Chief Ahiga Mr. Jamieson bought one of the boys in the gift shop. Musta fallen out of his pocket while he was crawlin. As I say, they could hear em yellin, but couldn’t none of the grown-ups fit in that hole. Couldn’t even reach the toy. They hollered for the boys to come to the sound of their voices, and if there wasn’t room to turn around to just back up. They shone their lights in and waved em around, and at first it sounded like the kids were gettin closer, but then their voices started to fade, and faded some more, until finally they were gone. You ask me, they were never close to begin with.”
“Tricky acoustics,” Yune said.
“Sí, señor. So then Roger said they should go around to the Ahiga side, which he knew pretty well from his explorin, what they call spee-lunkin. Once they got there, they heard those boys again, clear as day, cryin and yellin, so they got rope and lights from the equipment buildin and went in to fetch em out. Seemed like the right thing, but it was the end of em, instead.”
“What happened?” Yune asked. “Do you know? Does anybody?”
“Well, like I told you, that place is a goddam maze. They left one man behind to pay out rope and tie on more in case they needed it. That was Ev Brinkley. He left town shortly after. Went to Austin. Brokenhearted, he was . . . but at least alive, and able to walk in the sunlight. Those others . . .” Lovie sighed. “No more sunlight for them.”