Chapter 18
EIGHTEEN
CASEY
The trail leading to the bottom of the ravine was easier to navigate and more commonly used than Casey had expected when he first pushed through the brush and thicket, if the random dried-up horse manure and compact soil were any indication.
And they were. It wasn’t an interstate, but someone knew about this trail and had used it enough to keep the scrub from growing fully across it.
Casey had questions and the only way to answer them was to keep going.
“Huh,” he muttered for approximately the tenth time.
He was beginning to wonder if this path was a shortcut.
About half a mile in, the trail stopped switching and began sloping gently downward instead of the steep descent it had been.
For Casey, the hike wasn’t particularly difficult, but he was in excellent shape.
This wasn’t an easy walk in the woods, and he understood why someone would prefer to ride a horse.
The gurgle of anonymous streams reached his ears and occasionally he caught a glimmer of water through the birch, aspen, and dogwood trees that were mixed in with the evergreens.
It felt remote, like invading a place out of time.
Eventually, the trail widened, and after another few minutes of walking, Casey was dumped out along a wide, grassy area that had been homesteaded and abandoned long ago.
“The fuck?”
He prided himself on knowing everything there was to know about where he lived and worked, but he’d had no clue this old farm was here.
It was like finding gold or something even more precious.
A bit of history that Greta hadn’t thought to tell him about, if she’d even known.
He immediately checked his phone on the off chance he had bars, but nothing.
Instead, he used the camera to take some shots so he’d have something to show Greta as an excuse for sneaking out of the office.
He’d have to come up with another reason why he thought hiking down here had anything to do with Calvin, Peter Vale, Roy Wilson, or, as Gabe would call it, The Fuckery.
Because, in all likelihood, it did not. But here he was, poking around.
Three or four collapsed buildings had originally been built in a semicircle, but the circle had folded in on itself.
Not much left but rotting wood. Beyond that was a small—but from where he was standing, intact—barn-like structure.
Casey struck out across the grassy field toward it.
The barn had fared better. There was no horse or taking-care-of-a-horse gear laying around any of the three stalls, but the scent suggested that a horse had been there somewhat recently and often.
That explained the droppings he’d seen on the trail.
“Stranger and stranger.”
There was, however, enough thick and dusty cobwebs hanging from the ceiling and corners of the building to stock one of those Halloween stores. A giant house spider skittered across the floor, big enough to eat a person.
“You must have hitched a ride with someone,” he said.
Casey took a picture of it to show Gabriel. He looked around a bit longer but didn’t see anything handy like a murder weapon or signed confession nailed to a wall.
The building was open on both ends. Casey tromped through it, exiting out the other side. In the distance was yet another wood structure, and it appeared the basin terminated there. A museum’s worth of rusty equipment dotted the field between where he was standing and the other building.
“Holy cow.”
He was heading through the discarded machinery when he heard something. The snap of a twig, a rustle—a footfall, perhaps? Stopping, he turned in a circle but didn’t hear it again. Probably the wind.
Still, he called out, “Hello? Anyone there?” There was no answer, of course. It was his imagination working overtime. “Or maybe it’s that spider hunting me down for dinner.”
He shuddered. The spider had been huge, and he would always be Gabriel’s hero and remove them to the outdoors if they made it into the house, but Casey wasn’t a true fan of the eight-legged creatures.
Turning to the final structure, Casey began following the mere trace of a path across the meadow.
As he strolled along, he estimated the grassy area to be about a quarter the size of a football field.
The ground under his feet gave slightly as he walked, and he’d bet that the field was waterlogged during periods of heavy rain.
Clumps of cattails and other adaptive water plants on his route proved him right.
It was another storage building, but newer and prefab. Like the barn, it was in better shape than the other piles of matchsticks. Beyond it rose a sheer cliff, almost straight up from the meadow. A dark slash near the base had Casey’s heart beating hard.
“A cave,” he whispered, immediately wondering why he was being quiet.
There was no one around for miles. This place was basically unknown.
Yes, there were folks who must have had an inkling about it—and Paul and Etienne were undoubtedly on that list—but those types of people kept their lips zipped.
He wondered if someone in the past had hoped the cave hid precious metals.
There were mines in the Olympics dating back to the 1800s, but most had quickly been played out.
Others had never paid in the first place.
The majority of prospectors had been hunting for copper, but there’d also been miners looking for gold, silver, tin, even manganese.
But this could just be a natural cave, equally cool.
Feeling much like a kid who was close to finding the X where the buried treasure was hidden, Casey peeked inside the small building before heading to the opening in the rock face.
A stack of dusty boxes from the twenty-first century filled most of the small space.
They were taped shut and no one had left a bill of lading listing the contents.
He’d come back later with Greta. If it turned out that this was forest land, as he thought, then someone needed to keep an eye on it.
But what he was really interested in was that slash in the rock. The contents of the boxes could wait.
There was evidence that the natural ingress had been enlarged by humans using pickaxes and then clumsily finished off with timber supports. The supports made the access point look like a slowly collapsing pentagon, and Casey didn’t think they served any real purpose.
Regardless, the dark and slightly creepy entrance beckoned to him. He and Greta both loved spelunking. Neither one of them had met a cave they didn’t want to explore, and he couldn’t wait to tell her about his find.
Still a few feet away from the opening, Casey clambered up the incline and peered into the gloom, but visibility was only a few feet.
“What’s in there, cave? Bats? Most probably. Fool’s gold? Pirate treasure?” Most pyrite in the region was found along the coast, but Casey had been lucky enough to find some in The Valley over the years.
He fished around in his jacket pocket for his cell phone and turned on the flashlight.
If he’d been thinking, he would’ve brought along the industrial flashlight he kept in the Jeep.
If he’d driven the FS truck, he would’ve had the sat phone so he could call Greta and check in.
But he hadn’t thought he’d need it today.
His heart started to race again when he saw that stairs of a sort had been carved into the rock not too far inside the opening.
Hunching so he wouldn’t bang his head, Casey took a few steps forward, shining the light downward so he could see where he was placing his feet.
He knew not to go too far; places like this were incredibly dangerous.
But Casey was a caving nerd, and this was an amazing find. He couldn’t resist. How had this cave been kept a secret? He carefully edged forward.
He’d barely crept three feet into the cave, and it was as dank and dark as anyone would expect the underbelly of a mountain to be.
Water dripped with a regular bloop-bloop from somewhere above Casey’s head, making his skin crawl.
Irregularly shaped rocks protruded at odd angles from the walls, throwing wild shadows when he held his phone up to see what he could see.
Just one more step forward and—
“Shit!” A loose rock shot out from under his boot, careening out of the reach of his phone’s light.
It was several seconds before he heard it come to a stop with a thump.
Something rustled in the dark. Bats. Casey liked the creatures but didn’t like the idea of something clinging to the ceiling over his head, something that could at any minute decide to swoop erratically.
Another shiver ran across his skin, followed by goose bumps.
He glanced at his phone again, checking the screen. No bars, of course. It was getting late, time to start back to the Jeep, and then home to Gabriel. The cave wasn’t going anywhere; he and Greta could explore it together later.
Instead, Casey took another half-step forward. His shoulder bumped against something, causing him to overbalance, and his right foot shot out from under him. He lost his balance and plunged past the jagged stairs and into the darkness.