35
I don’t know. The snow is really piling up.”
“We’ll use our snowshoes.”
“The cave is a crime scene. No way Chief Grady isn’t going to have some opinions on this.”
“All the more reason to go now, while everyone’s at the town meeting. We’ll be in, out, done.”
Theo wasn’t fighting her that hard, given he was already lacing up his snow boots.
“And we’re looking for…?” Theo prodded as Mr. Man pranced between them in anticipation. Neither had had the heart to inform the dog that he was most definitely being left behind.
“I think it’ll be one of those we’ll know it when we see it kind of things.”
Theo straightened long enough to peer at her directly. He placed a quieting hand on Mr. Man’s back. “And the family?” he asked quietly. “If they’re indeed in there. Six bodies, including the kids.”
Raquel hesitated, then resumed fiddling with her gloves. “We’ll be respectful.”
But she knew that wasn’t what he really meant. She might have recognized the skeletal remains of an infant, but he hadn’t. And children, actual small children.
“I don’t mind going alone,” she offered softly.
Her husband, her beautiful darling husband, shook his head at her. Then he went to fetch the snowshoes while she turned to the dog to deliver the bad news.
Theo was not wrong. The conditions had deteriorated sharply, visibility already limited.
They could use the bordering tree line as a guide, hunkering down against the heavy, wet flakes as they forged a parallel path.
Theo graciously took the lead, bearing the brunt of the weather as she huffed and puffed behind him.
She worried she’d miss the entry point into the woods. The sheer whiteness of the landscape was daunting, ground and sky blending into a single disorienting plane. But after thirty minutes of hard walking, she detected a darker blemish among the snow-covered pines.
Both came to a halt. Theo’s dark hood and balaclava were covered in icy crystals. He even had a few flakes stuck to his eyelashes. At any other time, she would’ve been tempted to kiss them away. Now she focused on their target.
The dense clumps of trees formed a natural shelter, reducing the snow cover.
They ditched their winter walkers to better manage the rough terrain.
This time Raquel took the lead, threading her way carefully through the thick undergrowth and low-hanging limbs.
She had a rough sense of direction from the night before.
Up, to the left, more up, now easing to the right.
Then, there they were. The pewter-gray ledge thrust out of the woods like the wall of a medieval fortress, dusted in white, but losing none of its ominous edge.
“Wow,” Theo declared in awe. “That’s um…that’s real.”
Raquel clicked on her flashlight to assist in the falling light. It took a couple of tries to navigate up to the cave entrance, now marked by yellow tape, with a few orange cones added outside to show the way.
Theo whistled in appreciation. “Crazy. Without the investigative window dressing, I would never have spotted this.” He studied both sides of the steep granite, where the rock seemed to extend as a solid wall, when in fact it was one block nestled just behind another, with a narrow crevice in between, only visible from the side.
“Mother Nature is one hell of an architect.”
He was stalling. She didn’t push, now that they were both here, knowing what they were about to see in this dark, oppressive space.
She felt a cold shiver down her spine. An icy draft of wind? An innate sense of foreboding?
Snippets of the journal entries flashed through her mind.
Terrible shadows…devils dancing…the flames of hell itself.
Theo’s hand was on her shoulder. “You’re sure?”
“I’m sure.”
He activated his headlamp. Together, they stepped into the gloom.
Emerging on the other side was both better and worse than Raquel anticipated. Better, because the search team had left LED lanterns softly glowing at strategic intervals to maintain basic visibility. Worse, because the lamps cast an eerie mix of shadow and light across an already disturbing scene.
Bones. Scattered in all directions. Larger piles clearly delineated with crime scene tape, while pink evidence flags bloomed like flowers across the dark floor. It would’ve been beautiful had it not been so macabre.
Beside her, Theo had gone still.
She squeezed his hand. After another moment, he returned the pressure.
“That’s a skull,” he said, voice low. “I know I just saw one in the well. But that felt different. It was old, like an exhibit in a museum. This…this is…”
“Sad.”
“Yeah.”
He swallowed thickly. She squeezed his hand again. “Okay,” he said, a bit more crisply. “We’re here. Now what?”
If only she knew. “The witch rhyme, its four colors. Mason jumped to the conclusion that the colors referred to lost currency. And maybe they do, but take it from an interior decorator—color is a powerful tool, with color symbolism being a basic tenet of design.”
“Color symbolism?”
“People have an inherent response to color. The color red. Can signify love, hence Valentine’s Day; stimulate hunger, which is why it’s used in many restaurant interiors; and also convey danger, à la stop signs.”
“Navigation,” Theo added thoughtfully. “In boating, a red light indicates port side. All right, colors are a language unto their own. But how does that apply to a dimly lit cave?”
“Beats me. To Betty’s point, however, I’ve never heard of color-coded early-American witches.
Red, blue, black, and white. Hmm.” She found herself shivering again and released Theo’s hand long enough to rub her arms. “This space. It feels so wrong. And not just what we’re seeing now.
It’s more than that. Deeper than that. What those women described to the midwife.
Their nightmares of devils and demons. They were here. This…this is where it all happened.”
They both lapsed back into silence, gazing at the scene around them. So many bones—a skull, part of a pelvis, what appeared to be a femur, clearly some ribs. And over there, another skull, definitely smaller than the first.
Raquel forced herself to breathe.
“There’s a stone.” Theo spoke up finally. “In the middle of that alcove, do you see it? It’s flat, unnaturally so. Kind of like, you know, a creepy altar piece that might be used for human sacrifice.”
She didn’t require his graphic description to see his point. Of all the various features in the cave, the flat stone stood out. They worked their way closer.
Theo shined his light directly upon the surface. It gleamed with such dark, glossy tones it appeared wet, but Raquel didn’t have it in her to touch it to find out. Dear Lord. She was shaking terribly now.
“We should go,” Theo said. “You can explain color theory to the sheriff later. Let her deal with this.”
Raquel shook her head. “Black. Onyx maybe? But either way, about as black as black gets, don’t you think?”
Theo sighed, looking around gamely. The boulder was positioned before a dark, curved nook. He stepped inside, sweeping the space with his flashlight.
“Raquel.”
He illuminated the chiseled stone above him, homing in as shiny blue dots appeared. Some kind of mica flecks in the rock? They studied it, then nodded as one.
“Now we just need red and white.”
Raquel already had an idea on that subject. Kneeling down, she brushed away a top layer of dirt and debris from the base of the altar. A thick vein of milky white quartz appeared, zigzagging the stone floor. “And now red.”
“I’m guessing feldspar, a reddish mineral common in these parts,” Theo murmured instantly. “Hence the Redstone Quarry. It’d be protruding, like a chunky crystal.”
They started searching in earnest, Raquel, wiping off various bumps and outcroppings with her gloved hands while Theo brought his headlamp closer.
“Holy shit.”
The walls, as Theo had predicted, were dotted with pinkish gray clumps. Cleaned and polished, Raquel could only imagine how beautiful it would look. The entire alcove, for that matter, a mineral wonderland of red, blue, black, and white. Meaning.
She looked down directly where they stood.
“If X marked a spot?” she asked quietly.
“We didn’t bring a spade or pickaxe.”
“Don’t worry. I did.”
Three things happened nearly at once. Raquel and Theo snapped around. Theo’s headlamp went flying as he was struck by an arcing shovel. And a heartbeat later, a gun went off.