“Um, Candace, maybe we shouldn’t be calling out to them like that,” Ruthie suggested. “You know, just in case there’s someone else down here. Someone whose attention we might not want to attract?”
Candace turned back and looked at Ruthie. “Who’s in charge here?” she snapped.
Ruthie reached into her jacket pocket, wrapped her fingers around the grip of the gun.
“You doing okay?” she asked Fawn.
Her little sister nodded up at her, but her face looked flushed in the dim light. Ruthie put a hand to her forehead—Fawn was burning up again. Shit. Ruthie hadn’t brought any Tylenol. What happened to a kid if a fever got too high? Convulsions—brain damage, maybe.
She had to get Fawn out of here; she never should have brought her in the first place. She needed to get her home, give her some medicine, put her to bed, get a friend to come watch her; then she’d make Buzz come back into the cave with her to search for her mother.
“Mimi says this is a bad place,” Fawn said, her eyes glassy and dazed-looking. “She says not all of us will make it out of here.”
Ruthie leaned down and looked in her sister’s eyes. “We’re going to get out of here, Fawn. I promise. Soon.”
“Shh!” Candace hissed; she stopped suddenly, her left hand raised in the air in a hold-on-now gesture. They stopped behind her, listening.
“Did you hear that? Footsteps! Up ahead. Come on!” Candace moved quickly. Ruthie took Fawn’s hand and began to follow Candace, clicking on her own flashlight so she could see the way. She and Fawn came upon a narrow opening in the rock wall that led off to the right. Candace had followed the main tunnel and was far ahead of them now, her light bouncing off the walls. Gripping Fawn’s hot hand tightly, Ruthie pulled her sister into the side tunnel. She had to bend over to fit.
“Hurry,” she whispered as she ducked into the passageway, towing Fawn along behind her.
“Where are we going?” Fawn asked. “I thought we were all going to stay together.”
“I’m not sure that’s such a good idea,” Ruthie said. “That lady’s got a few loose screws.”
“Huh?”
“Never mind, just stick close, ’kay? I’m going to get us out of this place. Caves can have more than one entrance, right?”
“I guess,” Fawn said; then she whispered something Ruthie couldn’t quite make out to Mimi.
The tunnel was tall enough for Ruthie to stay upright, but the opening narrowed until she could barely squeeze through. She struggled out of her coat, abandoning it on the cave floor. Now she was wriggling along sideways, her belly and butt scraping painfully against the rock walls, the gun in her right hand, behind her, carefully pointed downward; she clutched the flashlight in her left hand, extended ahead of her, to illuminate the way. Her back was slick with sweat. She forced herself to keep moving, keep breathing.
“How are you doing back there, Little Deer?” Ruthie asked, unable to turn to look at her sister.
“Fine,” Fawn said.
“You just stay right behind me,” Ruthie said.
“Uh-huh.”
As they slowly edged forward, something seemed to change: the tunnel was widening, and the darkness—was it changing? Ruthie flipped off her flashlight. There was definitely light coming from up ahead. Had they somehow circled back to the main room they’d entered with all the lamps lit? Ruthie’s heart leapt—were they that close to freedom?
“Shh,” Ruthie said, reaching around to slide the flashlight into her back pocket. They crept forward slowly, on tiptoes, the walls getting brighter, the tunnel widening further as they moved. The tunnel ended up ahead, opening into a cavern that was most definitely not the room they’d been in before. Ruthie pressed her back against the wall of the tunnel and pulled Fawn beside her, putting a finger to her lips. Fawn nodded. Ruthie put up her hand to indicate, You stay here. Fawn nodded again, eyes huge and lemurlike. With the gun clasped firmly in her right hand, Ruthie edged forward to peek into the room.
The chamber was triangle-shaped, smaller than the one they’d first entered, with a lower ceiling. There was a table, with an oil lamp burning. At the table, a single chair. In the chair, a woman sat with her back to them. Ruthie recognized her shape, her hair, the well-worn gray sweater. She wanted to call out, but she sensed danger close by. Something about the scene in front of her didn’t feel right—it felt like a trap. “Stay here,” she whispered to Fawn, pressing her sister against the wall. “If anything goes wrong, you run like hell.”
Fawn gave a panicked nod.
Ruthie crept into the room, eyes darting around, looking for anything hiding in the shadows. There was nothing. No other furniture, no signs of life. One other passageway led out of the chamber, like a dark mouth on the other side. It was possible that there could be someone, something, hiding in the shadows there, watching.