Clint’s voice came to her, inquiring if maybe—just maybe, and don’t take this as an accusation, please—there was a risk-reward ratio that needed to be reconsidered here?
Let’s unpack it, shall we, Lila? The risk is that you are climbing into an unsettled wreck at the bottom of an unsettled mountain. Also, there are goddam wild, deranged-looking dogs out there, and a pregnant drug addict waiting—or not waiting—with the horses. And you are—again, no criticism, merely setting down the facts, darling—forty-five. Everyone knows that the prime age for a woman to crawl around unsettled and volatile ruins is from her late teens to her late twenties. You’re out of the target group. It all adds up to a significant risk of death, horrible death, or unimaginably horrible death.
In the next cell, Lila had to climb over a battered steel toilet, then slip down through another hole in the floor that had been the right wall. Her ankle bent funny when it hit the bottom, and she grabbed for purchase. Something metal slashed her hand.
The wound on her palm was a deep red gash. It probably needed a stitch or two. She ought to turn back, get some ointment and a proper bandage from the first aid kit that they’d brought.
Instead, Lila ripped off a piece of her shirt and wrapped her hand. She used the flashlight to find another stencil on the wall: Secure Wing. This was good. That sounded like exactly the place where they’d seen the woman in the cell. What was bad was that the new hall was situated above her head, a shaft going upward. What was worse was the leg in one canted corner, raggedly severed two inches above the knee. It was clad in green corduroy. Nell Seeger had been wearing green cords when the expedition had left for Eagle.
“I’m not going to tell Tiff about this,” Lila said. Hearing herself speaking out loud both startled and comforted her. “It would do no good.”
Lila pointed her beam upward. The Lion Head’s secure wing had become a great wide chimney. She shone the light from side to side, looking for a way to go, and thought she might see one. The ceiling of the wing had been of the drop-panel type; the panels had all shaken loose in the slide, but the steel gridding remained in place. It resembled a trellis. Or a ladder.
As for the reward, Clint offered, you might find someone. Might. But be honest with yourself. You know that this wreck is empty, just like the rest of the world. There’s nothing to be found but the bodies of the women who went with Nell. Let that one severed leg stand for all of them. If there were other women in the world you’re calling Our Place, they would have made themselves known by now. They would at least have left some trace. What is it you think you have to prove? That women can be Marlboro Men, too?
It seemed that even in her imagination, he couldn’t just tell her he was afraid for her. He couldn’t stop treating her like one of his incarcerated patients, throwing leading questions like dodgeballs in a playground game.
“Go away, Clint,” she said, and for a wonder, he did.
Lila reached up and grabbed the lowest trellis of ceiling gridding. The crosspiece bowed, but didn’t break. Her hand sang and she felt blood leaking around the edges of her rag bandage—but she hung on and pulled herself up, and upright. She braced her boot on the crosspiece and pushed down. It bowed again—and held. Lila reached up, pulled, stepped. She began to ascend the ladder of gridding. Each time she came to the level of a cell door, Lila used her good left hand to hang on while she swung out in the air, shining the flashlight with her hurt right. There was no woman to be seen through the wired glass at the top of the first cell door, no woman in the second, no woman in the third; all she saw were bed frames sticking out from what had been the floors. Her hand pulsed. The blood was dripping down inside her sleeve. Nothing in the fourth cell and she had to stop and rest, but not for too long, and definitely no looking down into the darkness. Was there a trick to this kind of effort? Something that Jared had mentioned about cross-country, something to tell yourself? Oh, right, now she had it. “When my lungs start tightening up,” Jared had said, “I just pretend there are girls checking me out, and I can’t let them down.”
That wasn’t much use. She’d just have to keep going.
Lila climbed. The fifth cell contained just a cot, a sink, and a dangling toilet. Nothing more.
She had arrived at a T. Off to the left, across the channel, the length of another hall stretched away. Far off, at the end of the hall, the beam of Lila’s flashlight found what appeared to be a pile of laundry—a body or bodies, she thought, the remains of the other explorers. Was that Nell Seeger’s puffy red jacket? Lila wasn’t sure, but as cold as it was, she could smell the beginnings of decomp. They had been tossed around until they snapped and then probably tossed around some more. There was nothing to do but leave them there.
Something moved amid the pile and she heard squeaking. The prison’s rats had survived the tumult, it seemed.
Lila climbed some more. Each metal grid seemed to give more under her weight, creaking longer and higher with every push-off. The sixth cell was empty and so were the seventh and the eighth and the ninth. It’s always the last place you check, isn’t it? It’s always on the top shelf of the closet at the very back. It’s always the bottom file in the stack. It’s always in the littlest, least-used pocket of the knapsack.
If she fell now, at least she’d die instantaneously.
You always—always, always, always—fall from the topmost grid of the ceiling that you’re using for a ladder in the hall of the maximum security prison that has gone sliding down the unstable remains of a former coal mountain.
But she decided she was not going to quit now. She had killed Jessica Elway to defend herself. She had been the first female police sheriff in the history of Dooling County. She had clapped handcuffs on the Griner brothers, and when Low Griner had told her to go fuck herself, she had laughed in his face. A few more feet wasn’t going to stop her.
And it didn’t.
She leaned out into the dark, swinging free as if unfurled by a dance partner, and cast the beam of her flashlight through the window of the tenth cell door.
The blow-up doll had come to rest with its face against the glass. Its cherry red lips were a bow of surprise, made for fellatio; its eyes were a thoughtless and seductive Betty Boop blue. A draft from somewhere caused it to nod its empty head and shrug its pink shoulders. A sticker on its head was printed with the label, Happy 40th Birthday, Larry!
12
“Come on now, Lila,” said Tiffany. Her voice drifted up from the well. “Just take one step and then worry about the next step.”