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“No scorch marks. Hacksaw, would be my guess.”
He shone his flashlight into the bar’s empty floor socket and could see, a few inches down, a stub of metal.
Sam looked at Remi. “The plot thickens. Somebody’s been here before.”
“And didn’t want anyone to know about it,” she added.
After taking a moment so Sam could get a bearing on his compass and sketch a rough map in his moleskin notebook, they squeezed through the gap, refitted the bar in its upright position, and continued on. The tunnel began zigzagging and narrowing, and soon the ceiling was at four feet, and Sam’s and Remi’s elbows were bumping along the walls. The floor began sloping downward. They put away their flashlights and turned on their headlamps. The floor steepened until they were sidestepping their way down a thirty-degree grade, using rock protrusions as hand- and footholds.
“Stop,” Remi said suddenly. “Listen.”
From somewhere nearby came the gurgling of water.
Sam said, “The river.”
They descended another twenty feet, and the tunnel flattened out into a short corridor. Sam shimmied ahead to where the floor began sloping upward again.
“It’s nearly vertical,” he called back. “I think if we’re careful, we can free-climb—”
“Sam, take a look at this.”
He turned around and made his way back to where Remi was standing, her neck craned back as she stared at the wall. In the beam of her headlamp, an object about the size of a half-dollar bulged from the rock.
“It looks metallic,” Sam said. “Here, climb aboard.”
Sam knelt down, and Remi climbed on his shoulders. He slowly stood up, allowing Remi time to steady herself against the wall. After a few
seconds she said, “It’s a railroad spike.”
“Say again?”
Remi repeated herself. “It’s buried in the rock up to the cap. Hold on . . . I think I can . . . There! It’s tight, but I managed to slide it out a few inches. There’s another one, Sam, about two feet up. And another one. I’m going to stand up. Ready?”
“Go.”
She rose to her full height. “There’s a line of them,” she said. “They go up about twenty feet to what looks like a shelf.”
Sam thought for a moment. “Can you slide out the second one?”
“Hold on . . . Done.”
“Okay, climb back down,” said Sam. Once she was back on the ground, he said, “Good show.”
“Thanks,” she said. “I can think of only one reason they’d be that high off the ground.”
“So they’d go unnoticed.”
She nodded. “They look fairly old.”
“Circa 1973?” Sam wondered aloud, referring to the year Lewis King disappeared.
“Could be.”
“Unless I miss my guess, it looks like Bully, or some other phantom spelunker, built himself a ladder. But to where?”
As Sam’s words trailed off they panned the beams of their headlamps up the wall.
“One way to find out,” Remi replied.