Chapter 7
“I heard footsteps behind us,” Tess says.
The detective stops writing notes and looks up.
“The noise was faint. But I knew someone was following us. I could hear shuffling down the tunnel behind us, boots and gloves on muddy rock.”
“Did Allie hear it?”
“When I told her to stop, the footsteps went quiet, too.” She hesitates. “It was almost supernatural how perfectly they’d
matched our pace. I watched behind us with my flashlight. We listened to the silence for a long time, just waiting for it
to move again.”
Of course, Washington knows, this would have been an inconclusive test. A stalker would know better than to reveal himself.
“If the Green Ridge guy was secretly following you down the tunnel and he heard you both stop walking suddenly, he’d stop,
too, wouldn’t he?”
“That’s exactly what I told Allie.”
“She wasn’t afraid?”
“She had an explanation for everything.” Tess shrugs with an emotion the detective can’t quite pinpoint. Annoyance? Sadness?
Something else?
“How’d she explain it?”
“She just smirked at me, like it was all a joke. She said she was sorry, she’d forgotten to show me something. She said, Watch this. Then she raised her foot and took a loud step.”
“And?”
“And that same step echoed from the dark behind us,” Tess remembers. “She took another, and I heard another matching echo.
That part of the Devil’s Staircase is weird, apparently. I forget the word she used, but something about the shape of the
tunnel bounces sounds right back at you. Like an echo, but perfectly preserved.”
Another human sense corrupted by this strange underworld. Last year in London, Washington experienced a similar acoustic phenomenon
called a whispering gallery in St. Paul’s Cathedral. By standing in just the right place, you can whisper to someone standing fifty feet away, and they
can hear you with startling clarity. She’d learned of this only when she heard her husband’s breathy, disembodied voice inches
behind her ear: Hello, Layla.
“So,” Tess says, “I stomped to test it myself.”
“And?”
“Sure enough, a duplicate echo came back.”
At this point, Washington knows the two women were standing just a few feet from the site of the attack. Tess and Allie were
right at the precipice of a life-altering act of violence. They had no idea what awaited them.
Except—maybe Tess did.
“I worried that someone was just using the audio trick to get closer to us,” Tess says. “Taking advantage of the tunnel’s
weird acoustics. He could be following behind us, letting the crisscrossing echoes mask his footsteps.”
An admittedly cunning strategy for a stalking killer. Anywhere else in the cave’s tomblike quiet, the slightest human movement
would stand out and be easy to track. Anywhere except there, in that particular tunnel.
This man knew what he was doing.
“And . . .” Tess’s voice weakens. “Allie thought I was being paranoid.”
It’s only paranoia until you’re right. Most rational people would see ordinary events in the blur of daily life: an inappropriate remark from a lumber worker, an optical illusion, a known auditory phenomenon.
The greater picture forms only after the tragedy, after people are dead.
But this young woman, in her intuition, managed to sense the danger before it chose to reveal itself.
Tess was an intelligent woman, canny and perceptive.
“You’re good with details, Tess.”
“I’ve always been a bit of a control freak.”
“How so?”
“I’ve never been comfortable being a passenger in other people’s cars, or flying, or even getting on a roller coaster. The
sensation of being powerless . . . bothers me.”
“Where’d it come from?”
She shrugs. “A survival tactic, I think.”
“Bad home?”
She nods.
“How bad?”
“I never met my dad, and my mom had a drug problem.” Tess sits upright in her bed. “She’d . . . convinced herself that I was
possessed by the devil. When I was little, I even believed it, too. She told me over and over that I was different from the
other kids, that I didn’t have a soul. She said I had the devil’s yellow eyes, what she called deceiver’s eyes. She said I was his baby, not hers, and that I had a forked tongue. She made me pray dozens of times a day. Walking around
that tiny house was like navigating a minefield. I learned to say the right things and avoided saying the wrong things.” Her
eyes flick to the floor, embarrassed. “I still catch myself lying about things I don’t need to lie about, like what I had
for breakfast.”
Compulsive white lies are a common reflex among survivors of domestic childhood abuse. When pain or punishment can come at
any moment, you learn to adapt.
“And . . . if you said the wrong thing?”
Tess takes a breath. Then she lowers her hospital gown to expose her bare shoulder. Under the fresh cuts and bruises, the
skin on her back is blotchy red with scar tissue. Her flesh is hard and almost shiny, like plastic. Candle wax, even.
It’s a burn, but no ordinary one.
Washington’s stomach turns. “Acid?”
“Bleach,” Tess says. “To burn away the devil.”
“I missed that part of the Bible.”
“So did my mom.”
“I’m sorry, Tess. That’s terrible.”
“For months and months, as bad as it got, she kept threatening that if I ever told anyone about it, she’d throw my cat into
boiling water.” Tess covers up again. “It was Allie who convinced me to be strong and tell the police anyway.”
“And your cat?”
“I snuck her out of the house in my backpack.”
Clever.
“Allie’s family took me in during the criminal investigation. Her parents are lovely people. I owe them everything. I ended
up living in their guest bedroom for most of high school. Allie and I were basically sisters for a while.”
“And your mother . . . still in prison?”
“Never convicted.”
“Why not?”
“Bungled prosecution. Mishandled evidence. It just never came together, somehow, and the judge had no choice but to dismiss
it.” Remarkably, she doesn’t seem bitter about this. “Seeing how the system can fail from the inside . . . it’s why I decided
to go to law school.”
“To do it right?”
Tess nods. “It took me years to be brave enough to speak up about what was happening to me. And I only found the courage because I had a friend like Allie. If she hadn’t been there, I would’ve kept avoiding confrontation at all costs and stayed in that house until she killed me.
” Her eyes harden. “I want to do right for the next kid.”
Now, Tess is just a year away from taking the state bar exam. Good for her. Most of the law students Washington has met are
in it for the money, her nephew included. Often they know just enough to be dangerous, like a toddler with a firearm.
Tess is clearly different.
“I wish we’d turned around,” she whispers. “I wish I’d listened to my gut and not trusted Allie’s word that everything was
normal. I sensed something was wrong, I could feel it, but I was too timid to speak up about it.”
“What happened isn’t your fault.”
“I could’ve stopped her.”
“If Allie was as stubborn as you say, I doubt it.”
“I could have. If I pushed harder.”
“Let me propose an alternative version of the day, then.” Washington sets her notepad down and interlocks her fingers. “Let’s
say that after you encountered that Green Ridge employee, who we now know wasn’t really a Green Ridge employee, you’d both
decided to leave the cave. The whole trip canceled due to a bad feeling. You and Allie would have been alone in the woods
on the long hike back to her car, with no cover, no weapons, miles from help. He would’ve killed you both.”
Tess nods, unconvinced.
“Another alternative: had you and Allie turned around and left the cave at any point—after seeing the phantom red glow, after
your suspicion about the footsteps—you’d still have had to go right through him to reach the surface. Again, you’d both be
dead.”
“What are you saying?”
“As I see it, you and Allie were already in this man’s fatal trap the moment you set foot in the Devil’s Staircase. You couldn’t
feel it, but his snare was already around your necks. And you both made the best choice for your own survival, maybe even
the only thing that saved you: you kept going deeper into the cave. You stayed ahead of him, out of his reach. That’s what kept you alive that day. It’s why you’re here
in this hospital, Tess.”
The survivor nods reluctantly.
It’s impossible to ask her now, but Washington suspects Allie might have figured this, too. As tough and worldly as this young
woman seemed to be, she might have been concealing her true suspicions from Tess. The Devil’s Staircase is full of hidden
dangers, and an experienced caver like Allie might have planned to use them to elude a dangerous enemy or force him to lose
interest and move on.
Or maybe she even knew a lot more. As Tess described it, throughout the day she’d seemed almost willful in ignoring and minimizing her best friend’s fears.
Did Allie have a secret motive?
“I tried to take unpredictable steps,” Tess said, “daring whoever might be following us to screw up, mistime a step, and reveal
himself.”
“Any luck?”
She shakes her head. “Every time, the echo was a perfect copy.”
As Tess followed Allie deeper underground, the landscape seemed to morph around them. Now there were fewer labyrinthine alternate
routes or side chambers to memorize. Tess could sense their surroundings narrowing, funneling them until no other options
existed and there was only one direction to go. Down.
Tess asked again, “What’s the surprise?”
“You’ll see.”
At this depth, all forms of life seemed eradicated. No more spiders or crickets, no more streaks of bat guano. Even the oldest
Pepsi cans were gone. Only varying textures of lead-gray rock, as lifeless as the interior of an asteroid. She wondered if
they were entering some new phase Allie hadn’t yet explained, somewhere deeper than even the dark zone.
The tunnel kept shrinking like fun-house walls, crowding them single file. Tess had to walk directly behind Allie to fit,
her headlamp’s circular beam fixed on the woman’s back, and the surroundings tightened further until they were sidestepping
between ancient formations. Finally it tapered to nothing at all, and they stood together in a small pocket of the earth as
cramped as a janitor’s closet.
A dead end.
And a strangely anticlimactic one.
This didn’t match the planned route. Tess worried she’d misread the map—or could Allie be lost? On paper, the Devil’s Staircase
had looked like a giant ant colony, snarled with entwined tunnels. So where was all of it?
“Now”—her best friend grinned—“the fun part.”