Death & the Brewmaster's Widow (11 page)

He hunted among the brush and weeds until he found what he was looking for. Half buried under collected soil and greenery, a narrow stone staircase was cut into the side of the steep slope. He made his way carefully down the stairs, mindful of the slippery grass underfoot and confident that Wren was following. For a fleeting second he imagined leading Madeline down into this dark, dirty hole and almost laughed aloud.

“When these caves were open and being used, there was all kinds of stuff down here. The Lemp family had a swimming pool and a private theater in their section of the cave and there were biergartens and ballrooms and even a section that was designated as an air raid shelter during the Second World War, when they thought mainland America might see enemy air strikes. All those things would have taken labor to maintain, and they wouldn't have wanted the hired help using the same entrances and exits as the wealthy owners and paying customers. I figure this was a back door, an employee entrance for the waiters and bartenders and pool boys and whatnot.”

Three-quarters of the way down to the bottom of the gully, the steps ended on a natural ledge about five feet wide at its widest point. Death turned left and pulled aside a curtain of hanging vegetation. A dark opening led down into the earth. It was a little wider than a normal door and tall enough for Wren to walk through upright, though Death would have to duck. On both sides of the opening, empty bolt holes bled long, red stains against a backdrop of pink and white limestone.

“There used to be an iron gate across here,” Death said. “I imagine somebody probably stole it for scrap. It was rusted and broken down even back when we were here.”

He clicked on his flashlight and ducked inside, turning broad shoulders to pass through the narrow opening. Inside, the path dropped sharply. The passage was claustrophobia-inducing for the first ten yards, then opened out. They stood in a roughly octagonal room formed by a strange marriage of karst topography and old brickwork. The natural stone ceiling ten feet above showed scars where stalactites had been broken off and an intricately laid brick arch framed another doorway at the opposite side of the room. Through the doorway, a staircase led down into darkness deeper than the reach of his flashlight beam. These steps were carved into the rock, soft edged and beginning to wear down from the effects of age and erosion.

In the middle of the room, Death paused to shine his light back on Wren's face, pale in the darkness below startlingly red hair. “Miss Morgan,” he said formally, “allow me to welcome you to Cherokee Caves.”

eleven

On the surface, Wren
had been too hot in the secondhand jeans and sweatshirt. Inside the cave, she was quickly glad she was wearing them. Even on the ledge outside, the cool air poured from the opening. The chill intensified the deeper they went. By the time they stopped in the octagonal room, she felt like she was in a refrigerator. Her sweat turned cold and clammy and she tucked her hands into her armpits and wished she'd thought to bring gloves.

As if he were reading her mind, Death slung the backpack down and rummaged through it, handing her one pair of work gloves and pulling a second, larger pair on his own hands.

“I brought along some caving gear,” he said. “I didn't want to put it on outside because I didn't want anyone to figure out where we were going. I'm pretty sure we're trespassing, and I really don't want to get us arrested. I did leave an email message to Captain Cairn, telling him where we are and asking him to arrange a rescue party. If we're not out in four hours, it'll send automatically.”

“Good thinking.” She crouched at his elbow and peered into the backpack. “What else you got?”

“Hats.” He took out two hard hats, each with an LED light, and set one on her head and one on his own. “This isn't exactly a wild cave, but that doesn't mean it's not dangerous. I've got extra batteries for both the headlights and the flashlights, a first-aid kit that I hope we won't need, water, protein bars, a rope. And,” he reached back into the backpack and came out with a pad of paper, a detailed map of the area printed on translucent paper, a marker, a protractor, and a small device.

“We're mapping the cave?” Wren asked. “What's the gizmo?”

“A laser range finder with a built-in compass.”

“Neat. You learn this in the Marines?”

“I learned lots of things in the Marines,” he said, giving her a good-natured leer.

“Yes,” she said, voice dry. “Believe me, I know.”

He opened the drawing pad. There was a rough sketch on a scrap of paper clipped to the corner of the top sheet. “I found this map of the caves online. It's not precise and it's not aligned with surface features, but I figured it could help us keep track of where we are. It's actually called the Lemp and Cherokee Caves. It's all one cave system, but part of it was heavily developed by the Lemp family.”

The sketch showed a system of connected passages. There was a section on the left that looked, to Wren, like a highly stylized lobster. Linked to its right claw was a long, roughly rectangular loop. “Where are we now?”

“I can't say exactly. This entrance isn't on the map. The loop is no longer complete, though. The lower corner got lopped off by road construction when they built I55. That's here,” he pointed it out on the sketch, “and here,” he pointed it out on his street map. “I'd say that puts us somewhere near the juncture of the Lemp and Cherokee sections. The Einstadt Brewery is here, southeast of where we entered, so I'd expect an entrance to be somewhere on the far side of the loop. The thing is, though, it could be a completely separate passage. If so, it could connect to this caving system anywhere.”

Death lifted his hard hat to scrub a hand through his short hair. Wren could see the discouragement settling over him even as he spoke. “Hell, it might not be connected at all.”

“It might not,” she agreed. “But this was kind of a social hub for the brewing community, wasn't it? If he was going to all the trouble to build a passage from his home to his brewery, don't you think old Aram Einstadt would have wanted his own private entrance to the Beer Guys' Club, too?”

“I hope so. Anyway, I guess we won't know until we look, will we?”

He picked up the laser range finder and returned to the opening by which they'd entered. “How can I help?” Wren asked.

“You ever do any mapping?”

“No, afraid not.”

“That's okay. Tell you what. Why don't you get a pen—there's a couple extra in my pack—and a sheet of paper. I'll call out my readings and you write them down for me, then I'll show you how to plot them on the map.”

_____

“We saw this when we were here before. Randy wanted to try to shimmy up it and I had to smack him down. That boy had more sense of adventure than self-preservation sometimes.”

Death's chest hurt. He didn't know why—if it was the dank air in his bad lungs, strain from overexertion, crushing disappointment, or the weight of old memories, long forgotten and suddenly too vivid. He felt lightheaded, disconnected from these surreal surroundings. It was as if he were two different versions of himself, the carefree teenager who had explored these caves with his little brother and the worn-down ex-Marine, relying on the woman beside him much more than she probably knew.

“It's the central support of a freestanding spiral staircase,” Wren said, bemused. “It looks like a spine. Or a giant corkscrew.”

The rusting, rotting iron pole twisted up through a hole in the
ceiling, climbing a brick-lined, cylindrical shaft. Here and there, the fin of a stair support remained, though all of the actual steps were gone.

“Why is there a freestanding spiral staircase here? It couldn't have been a very pleasant way to go in and out. You can see how tight the spiral was and how tiny the steps were. And that shaft it runs through looks positively claustrophobic.”

“This chamber was the Lemp family's private theater. They had all the stalactites and stalagmites knocked down and replaced them with a stage and fancy decorations made of plaster and wire.” He pointed out a heap of trash in the middle of the floor. “The damp down here hasn't been kind to it. Anyway, from what I've read, the stage was tiny and there was no room backstage for the actors to change costumes between scenes. This staircase was here for them. Any time they had a costume change, they'd have to climb 34 feet to a dressing room on the surface, change as fast as they could, and then climb back down.”

It was two and a half hours into the four-hour window Death had allowed for them to explore and they'd covered the whole of the caverns. It had been a strange journey, here where mankind had trespassed and faltered and gone. Nature was slowly reclaiming its own, but the scars of human interlopers remained.

The floors were mostly paved, worn steps and rusted ladders leading up and down when the elevation changed. The walls were sometimes rock and sometimes masonry. Moldy plaster and the sharp scent of limestone gave the air a musty, aged feel. The only illumination was what they brought in with them, and the circles of their lights fell randomly on stone and old brick and iron; a decaying playground within a living cave.

They'd waded through shallow water where pale little fish swam.Water dripped in the distance somewhere and the high sound of liquid droplets echoed and carried, but the softer sounds of their voices and footfalls died unnaturally in the dank atmosphere.

Death found himself imagining the passages thronged with the lost and disillusioned ghosts of the old brewers, seeking and mourning their erstwhile splendor. Randy passed among them, his gaze distant, his face pale and his eyes as cold and dead as they had been in the autopsy photo.

They found the point nearest the Einstadt Brewery—almost underneath it, in fact—and then again a place where the caverns passed by within a few yards of the Einstadt mansion. They'd marked them on the map and searched the areas thoroughly, but there was nothing in either location to suggest there was or ever had been another passage. Wren lay a small, gloved hand on his right arm.

“Are you okay?”

Death responded by reaching his left hand over to take hers, anchoring himself to her. She was his rock, his light in the darkness, his hope for the future, and his reason to go on. Though he hid it as best he could, Death sometimes suffered from bouts of depression. It would be as if he'd hit a wall, and the depths to which his spirit sank frightened him. He wondered, sometimes, how he'd weathered his losses before he met Wren, and if he'd still be around had she not come into his life when she did.

“Why don't we rest here a bit?” she suggested. “We're not that far from the entrance. We've got plenty of time to get back and delete your email before Cap shows up with the cavalry.”

The ache in his chest and his difficulty in speaking was telling him he needed to slow down. They found a relatively dry spot on a boulder that had fallen from the wall and snuggled close together.
Death dug through his pack and brought out water bottles and protein bars and they ate and drank in silence. By the time the water was gone, he was feeling better. He snuck an arm around Wren's waist and gave her
a squeeze.

“You wanna make out?”

She giggled, an incongruously bright sound in the oppressive atmosphere, and the cave warped it and tossed it back as a creepy, demented echo. “It
is
a terribly romantic spot,” she agreed, “but I don't think I'd want to get naked down here. It feels too much like the walls are watching us.”

“The walls,” he said, “or something creeping along the walls. Low to the floor, maybe, and invisible in the darkness.”

She half shrieked and buried her face in his chest and Death laughed. “I have got to find a Tunnel of Love to take you through!”

“Very funny, Smart Guy! I think, if you don't mind, I'm ready to leave now.”

They stuffed their wrappers and empty water bottles back in Death's backpack and headed for the entrance they'd used. Death was almost back to the top of the long steps that led to the octagonal room when he realized Wren was no longer following him. He turned back and found her frozen on the stairs, her gaze fixed on a point beyond and above his left shoulder.

“Oh, that's cute,” he said. “You're trying to make me think there's a monster or something creeping up behind me. It won't work, you know. I have nerves of steel.” His voice was steady, but, in reality, he was fighting not to spin around and reach for the gun that wasn't at his hip.

“What?” She blinked. “Oh, no. No, I wasn't. That would have been funny, though. No, Death.
Look
! There's an opening in the wall behind you.”

He turned and looked where she was pointing. On the right wall, not quite 90 degrees from the entrance, an arched doorway built of brick broke the surface of the stone about five feet above floor level. A natural stone outcropping had hidden it from them as they entered. Even now, he wouldn't have noticed it had Wren not pointed it out. “I stumbled a little,” she said, “and my light just happened to hit it.”

They climbed the last few stairs and crossed to the opening. Holes in the walls dripped red-orange streaks where iron bolts had rusted away. The passage had worked-stone walls, a paved floor, and a brick ceiling.

“There must have been steps here,” Death said. “Probably somebody stole them for scrap.” He shone his light into the tunnel. On the back wall, directly across from the opening, something had once been painted in bright colors. Most of the picture had worn and flaked away, but you could still see a few details, changes in the wall's pigmentation, scabs of paint clinging here and there. He picked out what might have been part of an ornate capitol “E,” the curve of an “S,” and a “dt” at the end.

“Do you see what I see?” he asked. “Does that say what I think it says?”

“I think it says ‘Einstadt',” Wren said at once. “I think it was their logo.”

_____

The boulder was heavy, but Death had gone out into the gully—it was raining lightly again, he reported—and brought back a stout tree limb to serve as a lever. They brought a smaller rock over for a fulcrum, wedged the end of the limb under the side of the boulder, and Wren clung to the lever and dangled her whole body weight from the end. Death added his not-inconsiderable muscle to the effort and the large rock rolled across the paved floor and came to rest against the wall under the Einstadt doorway.

Wren climbed up first, then turned back to help her Marine. He was winded from the effort. She had already been worried about him. There was a faint wheeze to his breathing and she couldn't tell if his pallor was real or a product of the odd lighting. Finding this doorway had mentally and emotionally recharged him, but he was still physically exhausted. She was afraid the combination didn't bode well.

The passage they had found was paved, with worked-stone walls and brick arches every ten feet or so supporting the ceiling. There was nothing natural about this tunnel. Every inch of it had been dug out by man. “Why would they have a tunnel leading all the way over here?” she asked, as much to slow Death down a little as because she was curious.

“I don't know. And it looks like it was a fairly elaborate doorway into the octagonal room. I wouldn't think you'd paint a fancy logo on the wall if no one was going to see it but the hired help. Hell,” he shrugged, “maybe I was wrong about that being a service entrance. It seems really inaccessible to me, but maybe back in the 1920s, before it got all overgrown, it was more obvious.”

“We can research it after we're done here. We can look online and there's probably a library somewhere that'll be open tomorrow. Heck, even the Rives County Library is open on Saturday until five.”

Death chuckled a little at that but didn't answer. His laugh sounded heavy and the wheeze in his breathing was worse. Wren tugged at his arm to stop him and pulled the backpack away from him. “Sorry, sweetheart. You need something?” he asked.

“Yeah. I need to carry this for awhile and you need to slow down. Here,” she took a bottle of water from the pack and offered it to him. “Drink a little of this and get your breath back. We're not doing a marathon. Did you want to get out the compass and range finder and map this?”

He paused to take a drink and leaned against the wall, letting his breathing even out. “Nah. We can on the way out, if it looks like we need to, but so far there aren't any offshoots. I just want to see where this leads us. This is a well-built tunnel, did you notice? It's not wet, for one thing, even though it's raining outside. That tells me there probably aren't any open exits to the outside.”