cutting silence that followed my landing.
I took stock of the mess I’d gotten myself into. On one hand, I was bumped and bruised and scraped, but when I tested arms and elbows and knees, they all still worked.
On the other, I was trapped at the bottom of a sinkhole, and my neck had just been saved by a ginormous pile of bat guano.
I was well and truly in the shit.
24
i felt around for my flashlight, promising myself that when I got out of this—however I got out of this—I would indulge in an almighty freak-out about the fact that I was covered in bat crap. But for now I’d be thankful it had broken my fall.
Turning on the light helped. Knowing your situation, even when it sucked, was better than not. I was in a cave of reasonable size. One section seemed to go deeper into the ground, though I couldn’t tell how far because stalactites—or stalagmites, I could never remember which—blocked my view. I was not at all inclined to investigate, because that would mean crawling on my belly into places where neurotic control freaks were never meant to go.
In central Texas, school field trips to the big tourist caves are a requisite. Inner Space, Natural Bridge, Longhorn Caverns … limestone caves riddle the hills—big, little; dry, active; open, closed—and I knew from helpful docents—not just from Ben McCulloch—that sinkholes do open up now and then.
This one, judging by the pile of guano, had been there for a while. It only felt as though I’d been swallowed by the earth. Really I had just, literally, leapt before I looked.
The slope I’d slid down was way too steep to climb. The mouth of the cave was a flat oval with an overhang, ten feet or so above my reaching fingers. A few fluttering black shapes clung to it; it was probably solid with bats during the daytime.
I had nothing against bats. They ate bugs and were good for the ecology. I just didn’t want to be there when they got back.
Get a grip, Amy. You’re going to get out of here. It’s a bat cave, not the Grand Canyon.
And this wasn’t the Dark Ages, either. The solution, once I’d calmed down, was simple. I wiped my hands on a tiny clean spot on my shirt and fished my phone from my pocket with two fingers. There was not enough Purell in the world to make me happy just then.
Phin did not answer her phone.
“Dammit, Phin!” My shout scared the last of the bats away.
Habitually not answering her phone was annoying. Ignoring it while we were in the middle of a mystery was infuriating. Shouldn’t she be getting the heebie-jeebies about now?
I thumbed through my recent connections, hoping I’d phoned Mark or vice versa. But there was only one recent call that didn’t have a name attached to it, and I knew exactly who it was.
Would I rather die a slow, lingering death and be found by archaeologists someday, buried in petrified bat crap? Was that seriously worse than calling Ben McCulloch for help?
I swallowed my pride and hit “dial.” He answered on the second ring.
“Hello?”
That pride stuck in my craw when I remembered he was on a date with Caitlin. My night just kept getting worse.
“Hello?” he repeated. “Amy, is that you?”
“Yes.” Where to begin? “I don’t suppose you have a rope in your truck.”
“A rope? What kind of rope?”
“About fifteen feet long? Strong enough to hold, um—” I rounded up generously for safety. “—a hundred and twenty-five pounds?”
Over the phone, I heard a car door opening and closing with a slam. “Stop being coy. Where are you?”
I leaned my head against the stone wall. “Other than down a very deep hole, I don’t really know.”
After a pause—I didn’t even try to interpret it, because I was miserable enough—he said, “Does that phone have GPS on it?”
“Yeah. I think so. It finds the nearest Starbucks for me, so it must, right?”
Another pause, and this one I could interpret. “I can’t believe your aunt said you were her smartest niece.”
“She must have been talking about Phin.”
“God help your family, then.” I heard the gruff growl of his truck starting up. “Hang up, then find your position with your phone. You should be able to send it to me in a text, and I’ll put the coordinates into the GPS in my pickup.”
“I can do that.”
“Of course you can. It’s not rocket science.”
I decided to forgive him for being a jackass, because