Page 91 of You'll Be Sorry

Second nod.

“Fuuuuck.”

Mandy adjusted her headlamp and stepped into the gloom.

She’d expected her shoulders to brush against the sides of the entryway, but she passed through easily. Six steps through a corridor, then…

Her light sources were totally swallowed up by a yawning black void. She turned a full three-sixty, without illuminating a single wall. This cave had to be huge.

She set down the RDL and fired it to life just in time for Austin to exclaim, “Well, shit on a brick!”

Even the RDL hardly made a dent. Seriously, how had a cavern of this magnitude remained a secret?

Mandy felt swallowed by the mountain, the proverbial Jonah in the whale. She needed to proceed carefully in order not to disturb anything important. Again, her father at her shoulder.Patience. Real policing isn’t car chases or dramatic confrontations; it’s taking the time to do things right.

She stood to the side of the RDL’s glow, picked a lit path, and slowly worked her way forward, paying close attention to where she placed each foot. After a moment she noted what seemed to be a weathered twig here, a scattering of gray pebbles there. Bones. The deeper she headed, the more she spotted. Disarticulated, jumbled.What happens after thirty years of natural decomp and animal depredation. Two hundred and six bones in the human body, which if you multiplied by six…

Dear Lord.

She encountered more tumbled boulders she had to veer around. Then, a dark, glossy slab, positioned on its own. More bones, the startling sight of one intact rib cage, followed shortly thereafter by the first mottled gray skull.

While she may not have a professional anthro’s ability to identify and analyze the minor bits, she did know the major pieces when she saw them. Clearly they were looking at multiple victims and a variety of age groups given differing sizes. Say, as what you might expect to find in a grouping that included two adults and four children.

Austin had disappeared to fetch more lighting. Now he returned with reinforcements, including several members of his crew. Mandy reminded everyone to watch where they stepped as they dispersed around the cave, locating the outer walls, then firing the RDLs to life.

The whole of the cavern emerged. Vast. Startlingly tall. Additional dark voids indicated alcoves, maybe even tunnels forking out.

Mostly Mandy’s attention was held by the virtual bone field spreading out before them. Like a slaughterhouse, she thought. No logical grouping, say, the remains of a family of six huddled together against a common foe, or a line of precisely laid out remains vanquished by said foe.

This was chaotic, disorganized. Which maybe had been the group’s last moments, but could just as easily be the result of nasty raccoons. Mandy shuddered from the implied violence. Austin, she noticed, crossed himself while muttering under his breath.

Step by step, she reminded herself. She raised the camera and snapped more photos, careful to stay to the edge as much as possible.

She was vaguely aware of Austin ordering his guys out whilethreatening various unpleasant consequences if anyone breathed a word of this to others. Austin then hunkered down, quietly taking in the scene. A moment of reverence? A second attempt at coming to terms with the sheer magnitude of the find?

Mandy was here but not here. In this moment, but also a little girl staring at a murder board featuring four kids not so different from herself. She was the chief of police, she was her father’s daughter.

We did it, Dad. All these decades later. We found the Dixons. We’ll bring them home.

Which is how she got it, walking the scene again and again.

She checked the nooks and crannies; no tunnels but plenty of alcoves, some whose walls bore chisel marks, speaking to previous human interaction. Still no dice. She sent Austin to have his crew fan out and inspect the perimeter. Up, down, around.

But no matter how many times they worked the area, nothing changed. Austin, slowly but surely growing as agitated as she felt. Muttering again, “Makes no sense, makes no sense.”

Finally, they both came to a halt.

And Mandy, so help her God, finally put into words what they were both thinking, because again, you didn’t need to be a trained expert to recognize and count human skulls:

“Austin, if the Dixons were a family of six, why do we only have five of them?”

29

Heard you had some excitement last night!”

Raquel opened the front door to a beaming Betty Jenkins. The silver-haired historian was all bundled up against the weather and had arrived bearing gifts.

“Zucchini bread. Grew the squash myself.”