Shadow of Ashland (Ashland, 1) (21 page)

She looked at the letters in her lap, looked at me. "Thank you."

It seemed best. It seemed like what Jack would have wanted if he'd known he had a daughter.

"I have to go," I said.

Her hands tightened on the letters. "Will I see you again?"

"I think so. I've got friends here."

She smiled weakly.

"Family, too." I touched her arm. "The place gets into your blood."

And it was true. Family, I thought, looking at her clutching the letters. Woven together with threads of steel. Sometimes the threads bend and twist, and you have to hammer them back into shape. But they don't tear. They don't break.

Jack was in Toronto, with his father, somehow, somewhere. I had seen the rose, fresh and alive, in my mother's hand.

I stood on the sidewalk outside the Scott and gazed at the "luxury accommodations in the heart of the city" on the north side of Winchester. The Ashland Plaza Hotel had opened. Glancing back at the Scott, it was clear that its days were numbered.

I didn't know if there would be any more letters, from Ashland or anywhere else. I had no way of knowing what the future would bring.

It didn't matter.

I had no way of knowing what the past would bring either.

I felt good. Adventure wasn't in the past or the future. It was right here. Living my life. Now.

Jeanne and Adam were waiting for me on the veranda when I pulled up in front of the house. I shook hands with Adam, then put my arms around Jeanne and held her. She was wearing the perfume, the subtle Southern scent from the evening of the Chimney Corner Tea Room, and nothing that I could remember had ever smelled so good.

"Got a trip planned for tomorrow," I said. I took a swig of warm beer from the long-necked bottle of Bud and digested the look on Adam's face. We were back outside, sitting on the steps beneath a warm October sky.

"Where?" he asked.

"Got to get up early. Take us half the day to get there. We'll stay over in a motel tomorrow night, come home Sunday. My flight doesn't leave till Monday."

"Cincinnati? Baseball?"

"Nope. Not this time."

It was Jeanne's turn to become curious. She had thought she had guessed it, too. She balanced her beer bottle with a hand on her knee. "Where?" she asked.

"We'll have a picnic while we're there. We'll make sandwiches tonight."

Adam drank his Coke, eyes jumping from one to the other of us.

"I've been studying maps, brochures," I said. "Kentucky travel guides. Places to go, see. You know."

They waited. Jeanne smiled, watching Adam, her happiness evident.

"Ever been in a cave?" I asked Adam.

There was genuine surprise on his face. The expression on Jeanne's face wasn't far behind.

"No," he said.

I looked at Jeanne.

"Can't say that I have," she said with some wry amusement. Her eyes held mine warmly.

"Guess you could say they've become a bit of an interest of mine. Kentucky's shot through with some of the best anywhere. Got more than any other state. Over three thousand of them. Crystal Onyx Cave. Diamond Caverns. Just across the state line, West Virginia's got Lost World Caverns. You even got Carter Caves about thirty miles west of here."

"Is that where we're going?" Adam was smiling now, catching on.

"Nope," I said. "It's a surprise. Farther." I moved my hands apart the way someone does when describing a fish just caught. "Bigger."

"Man flies down from Canada, takes us on a mystery tour," said Jeanne.

"Wear walking shoes. Bring a coat." I looked at Jeanne, at Adam, smiled back at both of them, glad I was here.

2

We left at dawn and took 64 to Lexington, stopped and ate breakfast at a Bob Evans Restaurant in the city, then got onto the Blue Grass Parkway to Elizabethtown. From there we went south on 65.

"Where are we going?" asked Jeanne, finally. "Are you going to tell us?"

"Trust me," I said.

Adam giggled in the backseat.

Shortly before noon, we reached Mammoth Cave National Park, the longest cave systems ever discovered on earth.

"I've been reading about it," I told them as we pulled into the vast parking area. Buses from around the country were massed at various locations amid the sea of cars. "There's two hundred ninety-four miles, charted on five levels."
 

"Is it free?" asked Adam.

"Reasonable rates," I said. "I bought the tickets through a Ticketron outlet before I left Toronto."

"You're kiddin', " said Jeanne. Then she thought about it. "Like a Broadway play."

"Bigger than a Broadway play."
 

I stopped the car. "You got that lunch, partner?"
 

Adam banged his fist on the cooler on the seat beside him. Then he looked out at the picnic areas.
 

"I'm hungry."
 

"Me, too," he said.
 

I looked at Jeanne. She laughed.

"All cave tours are walking trips. There's seven to choose from. From half a mile to five miles, from one and a half hours to a half day."

"Jesus." Jeanne swallowed the bite of her ham-on-rye before continuing. "You're not going to make us walk five miles, are you?"

"No." I chuckled. "Sounds a bit much even for someone as incredibly fit as I am."
 

Adam giggled.

"Medium tour. Don't want the kid to strain himself."

He poked me in the ribs, still giggling.

Cave temperature was always fifty-four degrees, we were told. Most in the group of more than a hundred put on coats. Then we strolled through the entranceway, disappeared beneath the earth.

We went through huge rooms, winding passageways, saw towering formations, delicate onyx flowers, waterfalls, streams, pools. We went down ramps, up stairways, entered soaring caverns, inspected milky stalactites, stalagmites, flow- stone, limestone pendants, sparkling geological snowdrifts, rainbow coral.

Ever downward.

At the bottom, we entered the Mammoth Cave, the biggest, the best known.

It took my breath away.

Peering upward, I could not see its roof.

Darkness in every direction, in spite of the lighting system.

It was an opening in the earth that staggered the imagination, a space left behind millions of years ago by some dark, vanished sea, dwarfing us all.

I felt humbled, lost. I tried to imagine the first ancient discoverers of the cave, the fear, the awe.

The voice of the tour guide brought me back. "I'm going to turn the lights off," she said, "for just one minute. Don't move and don't speak. We want you to experience absolute darkness, just to see what it's like. You won't be able to see your hand in front of your face."

There was some nervous laughter.

"Ready?"

Jeanne stood on my left, Adam on my right. I placed my hand on her shoulder, left my right hand dangling.

The lights went out, and we stood there in total darkness. The seconds stretched out. Time stopped.

I could hear my heart hammering loudly in my blood. I thought of my mother. I thought of Jack, sitting in hotel rooms across America, softening his perception of his father. I thought of my grandmother, of her last years, of my brothers and sisters, of my own father, his hair impossibly white, sitting at the green arborite kitchen table with his hand in his belt, of the ancient money order made out to my mother, that I would carry in my wallet from now on. I thought of Ashland, where dreams die and are born again.

In the darkness.

There were decisions to make. I had my life to live.

Toronto. Ashland. Toronto. Ashland.

Jeanne. Jeanne.

Adam. Adam. Aidan.

Then, in the lightless space of that vanished sea below the earth, in the darkness, faced with the same terror and beauty, hope and loss, as those first ancient explorers, I felt small fingers slide into my right hand, seeking comfort from the void, and for a moment, just a moment, I thought it was my stillborn son.

My life to live.

The lights came on, my hand tightened on his, and he smiled up at me, eyes dancing with wonder.

Through new tunnels of dark beauty, the light filtering through prisms of mist, wary of precipices and footing, we began the ascent up out of the earth and rock, to new places that we could only know by arriving in them, feeling the warm wind trickling down from the surface ahead of us, just ahead of us.