“Yeah, yeah… you’ll try to kill me.”
No. I would succeed.
22
Allie
Being trapped in the dark with only guilt and a dead body changes your perspective. After the initial panic, I panicked some more. Then I planned, second-guessed my plans, panicked again, and finally calmed down enough to think.
While I was thinking I had plenty of time to sift through my mistakes. Like thinking I could somehow lead a normal life. Or pretending that I gave two shits about what the local PTA thought about a mobster’s granddaughter veterinarian. I’d been living lies.
No wonder my parents chucked it all and fled the city.
And no wonder Ellie developed a thick hide and a bitingly-sharp tongue to wage war against society.
Normal people never got trapped in a mobster’s cave hiding from ghosts. At least not ones they’d created themselves. But that was the whole crux of this. I’d been fighting ghosts my entire life, but never truly living. I’d squirreled away the money I’d inherited instead of spending it.
Why? What was the point?
So I could be judged?
At some point, I began to talk to myself as I imagined going home.
I was deep in conversation with my mother when I heard the quiet squeak of bats.
“As if the darkness wasn’t bad enough?” I asked the blackness.
My voice triggered a flurry of commotion as the tiny animals took flight and swooped past my face.
At first, I thought they’d traveled up the path toward wherever the path emptied near Don Conti’s lair.
Then I realized they’d turned sharply once brushing past me and angled downward. Their distant whistles quieted, leaving the same emptiness of sound that had been slowly driving me crazy.
I held a hand up and felt along the wall, raising it as I dared to wobble to my feet. I hit my head on the ceiling as I did and quickly sat back down.
The ledge I was on crumbled slightly.
I scooted farther up the slope to find solid ground.
Once my legs could stretch out without hanging over the edge, I leaned against the wall to catch my breath.
“I came in through a small opening.” It had been barely three feet high. I remembered stepping down as I crawled out of it, and also the way the wall tugged at my shirt as I squeezed through. Leandro had to force his body through because the opening wasn’t wide enough for his bulk. That had given me time to turn uphill and wind around a pillar of rock and halt in place as the enormity of the chamber hit me.
I pictured the scene in my mind, thinking of how it looked and how wide the path was.
“I had to curve around the opening and turn left.” And stepped down. Meaning that I’d passed the opening as I felt along the path in the dark because it was higher than I’d been touching.
Working slowly so I wouldn’t miss it again, I swept my right hand across the path, testing the width before kneeling. The ceiling was too low yet. Leandro wouldn’t have been able to squeeze through the opening if it was this short.
I moved about a foot before repeating my actions. Each time, I tested the height and then felt along the wall with my left hand as high as I dared to touch, feeling for a change in the wall.
Very quickly, I found the stairs. I slid down two before catching myself and sitting my ass down on the sloped edges.
“Ain’t no way I’m walking down this.”
So much for keeping Ellie’s clothes decent. I was covered in mud and sand by the time the grotto opened up.
The boat still floated in the pool of water, but the tide had receded, leaving a long swath of disturbingly gray silt that spanned to the pool.
