“We did.” The memory still sent me to the edge of panic. “A guy set off a stick of dynamite to cause the tunnel to collapse. Art and I found a side tunnel, but it necked down so tightly I got stuck—couldn’t move, couldn’t even breathe. Art finally shoved me through the bottleneck just as I was running out of air. My ribs and back were sore for weeks. I still have nightmares about that sometimes.”
“I’m guessing my back and butt will be sore for weeks from walking in this bent-over crouch,” Emert groused. “But we’re almost there.” He stooped and ducked into the tunnel that continued downhill from the base of the shaft. I followed, and after a short distance I saw him straighten up. Moments later I emerged from the tunnel into a square chamber. “Damn,” I said as I took in my surroundings. Unlike the sounds in the tunnels, the word reverberated and hung in the musty air. I was standing in a space nearly the size of the living room in my house, where half a dozen four-foot pipes converged and a pair of larger pipes, each five or six feet in diameter, exited on the far side. The ceiling must have been six feet high, for it allowed the three of us to stand upright, though I noticed that Emert—the tallest of us—had to spread his feet widely in order to keep from bumping his head. The room was lit by portable, battery-powered work lights, whose clusters of LED bulbs cast a cool, bluish-white light on the grimy concrete surfaces. The floor of the room was covered with layers of sand and mud, laid down and then scoured out and laid down again, sculpted and channeled by sediment-laden storm water.
The room’s size was what initially startled me, but its contents were what truly astonished me. A folding camp cot was nestled against one wall of the room; a puffy down sleeping bag lay crumpled on top, the bag’s red vivid against the blue of the cot’s taut nylon mesh. At the head of the cot, on a plastic milk crate, stood a kerosene lamp and a box of matches; at the foot was a wire-mesh wastebasket, half filled with empty cans and bottles and food wrappers. “My God,” I said, “someone’s been living here.”
“No shit, Sherlock.” Emert chuckled, obviously pleased that he’d managed to surprise and impress me.
“Isabella?”
“Don’t know,” said Art. “Looks like plenty of prints on bottles and cans in the trash—the lamp, too, thanks to the kerosene and the soot—but it’s better to bag everything and take it back to the lab, instead of trying to fume it here.”
Emert caught my eye and pointed to the opposite wall—the one where we’d entered. Midway along the wall, between our pipe and another, a pair of plastic milk crates supported an unfinished pine plank, and on this plank stood an elaborately carved wooden artifact. “Get a load of the pagoda,” he said.
“It’s not exactly a pagoda,” I corrected, “but close. I saw a presentation about these a few years ago by a cultural anthropologist from Asia. It’s called akamidana, if I remember right, and it’s a Shinto shrine to the gods of the ancestors. You find them in a lot of Japanese homes.”
Arranged on the plank in front of the shrine was a cluster of small glass bottles. I knelt and shone my flashlight into them and saw that they contained rice, salt, wheat, and what I guessed to be dried tea berries—traditional Shinto offerings to the gods. Emert played the beam of his light on the wall above the kamidana, where a Japanese symbol reached nearly to the ceiling. The black paint was fresh and bold; the concrete had obviously been cleaned shortly before the paint had been brushed on. The room suddenly exploded with light. “Jesus H.,” snapped Emert in the general direction of Art, whom I could no longer see. “Couldn’t you have warned us before using the flash?”
“Sorry,” said Art. “I didn’t mean to take the picture yet. I was just trying to check the focus, but I guess I pushed the shutter all the way down.”
“Man,” grumped Emert. “I thought for a second there that Oak Ridge had just been vaporized.”
“Really sorry,” Art repeated. “But now that you’re already blinded, let me take a couple more, just to be sure. We can send it to a translator and find out what it means.”
“I know what it means,” I said as I covered my eyes to shield them from the flash. “I’ve seen that symbol once before, on a pendant, and the woman wearing it told me what it meant. It’s the Japanese symbol for
‘remembrance.’ Isabella wore it around her neck.”
CHAPTER 12