“Holy shit!” Ralph exclaimed. “I’d say he went native, but this is more like the opposite.”
It was the same noble profile, but now the cheek facing the camera was deeply scored with wrinkles and the headdress was gone. The former Navajo chieftain was wearing rimless spectacles, a white shirt, and a tie.
Holly said, “In addition to running Marysville’s only successful business, it was Chief Ahiga, aka Thomas Higgins, who discovered the Hole and ran the first tours. They were quite popular.”
“But the cave was named for the town instead of for him,” Ralph said. “Which figures. He may have been a Christian and a successful businessman, but he remained a redskin to the community. Still, I guess the locals treated him better than the Christians in Austin. Got to give them some credit for that. Go on.”
She showed him another picture. This one was of a wooden sign with a painted version of Chief Ahiga in his headdress, and a legend beneath reading BEST PICTOGRAPHS THIS WAY. She used her fingers to zoom out, and Ralph could see a path leading through the rocks.
“The cave has the town’s name,” she said, “but at least the chief got something—the Ahiga entrance, much less glamorous than the Chamber of Sound, but with a direct connection to it. Ahiga’s where the staff brought in supplies, and it was a way out in case of an emergency.”
“That’s where the rescue parties went in, hoping to find an alternate route that would take them to the kids?”
“Correct.” She leaned forward, eyes shining. “The main entrance isn’t just boarded up, Ralph, it’s cemented over. They didn’t want to lose any more kids. The Ahiga entrance—the back door—was also boarded up, but none of the articles I read said anything about it being plugged with cement.”
“That doesn’t mean it wasn’t.”
She gave her head an impatient toss. “I know, but if it wasn’t . . .”
“Then that’s how he got in. The outsider. That’s what you believe.”
“We should go there first, and if there are signs of a break-in . . .”
“I get it,” he said, “and it sounds like a plan. Good going. You’re a hell of a detective, Holly.”
She thanked him with her eyes lowered, and in the tentative voice of a woman who doesn’t know quite what to do with compliments. “You’re kind to say that.”
“It’s not kindness. You’re better than Betsy Riggins, and much better than the waste of space known as Jack Hoskins. He’ll be retiring soon, and if the job was mine to give, you’d get it.”
Holly shook her head, but she was smiling. “Bail-jumpers, repos, and lost dogs are enough for me. I never want to be part of another murder investigation.”
He stood up. “Time for you to go back to your room and get some shut-eye. If you’re right about any of this, tomorrow’s going to be a John Wayne day.”
“In a minute. I had another reason for coming here. You better sit down.”
16
Even though she was a much stronger person than she had been on the day she’d had the great good fortune to meet Bill Hodges, Holly was not used to telling people they had to change their behavior, or that they were flat-out wrong. That younger woman had been a terrified, scurrying mouse who sometimes thought suicide might be the best solution for her feelings of terror, inadequacy, and free-floating shame. What she felt most of all on the day when Bill had sat down next to her behind a funeral parlor she could not bring herself to enter, was the sense that she had lost something vital; not just a purse or a credit card, but the life she could have led if things had been just a little different, or if God had seen fit to put just a little more of some important chemical in her system.
I think you lost this, Bill had said, without ever actually saying it. Here, better put it back in your pocket.
Now Bill was dead and here was this man, so like Bill in many ways: his intelligence, his occasional flashes of good humor, and most of all, his doggedness. She was sure Bill would have liked him, because Detective Ralph Anderson also believed in chasing the case.
But there were differences, too, and not just that he was thirty years younger than Bill had been when he died. That Ralph had made a terrible mistake in arresting Terry Maitland in public, before he understood the true dimensions of the case, was only one of those differences, and probably not the most important, no matter how it haunted him.
God, help me tell him what I need to tell him, because this is the only chance I’ll have. And let him hear me. Please God, let him hear me.
She said, “Every time you and the others talk about the outsider, it’s conditional.”
“I’m not sure I understand you, Holly.”
“I think you do. ‘If he exists. Supposing he exists. Assuming he exists.’ ”
Ralph was silent.
“I don’t care about the others, but I need you to believe, Ralph. I need you to believe. I do, but I’m not enough.”
“Holly—”
“No,” she said fiercely. “No. Listen to me. I know it’s crazy. But is the idea of El Cuco any more inexplicable than some of the terrible things that happen in the world? Not natural disasters or accidents, I’m talking about the things some people do to others. Wasn’t Ted Bundy just a version of El Cuco, a shape-shifter with one face for the people he knew and another for the women he killed? The last thing those women saw was his other face, his inside face, the face of El Cuco. There are others. They walk among us. You know they do. They’re aliens. Monsters beyond our understanding. Yet you believe in them. You’ve put some of them away, maybe seen them executed.”
He was silent, thinking about this.
“Let me ask you a question,” she said. “Suppose it had been Terry Maitland who killed that child, and tore off his flesh, and put a branch up inside him? Would he be any less inexplicable than the thing that might be hiding in that cave? Would you be able to say, ‘I understand the darkness and evil that was hiding behind the mask of the boys’ athletic coach and good community citizen. I know exactly what made him do it’?”
“No. I’ve arrested men who have done terrible things—and a woman who drowned her baby daughter in the bathtub—and I’ve never understood. Most times they don’t understand themselves.”
“No more than I understood why Brady Hartsfield set out to kill himself at a concert and take a thousand or more innocent children with him. What I’m asking is simple. Believe in this. If only for the next twenty-four hours. Can you do that?”
“Will you be able to get some sleep if I say yes?”
She nodded, her eyes never leaving him.
“Then I believe. For the next twenty-four hours, at least, El Cuco exists. Whether or not he’s in the Marysville Hole remains to be seen, but he exists.”
Holly exhaled and stood up, hair windblown, suit coat hanging down on one side, shirt untucked. Ralph thought she looked both adorable and horribly fragile. “Good. I’m going to bed.”
He saw her to the door and opened it. As she stepped out, he said, “No end to the universe.”
She looked at him solemnly. “That’s right. No end to the fracking thing. Goodnight, Ralph.”