THE DARK HOLE
The Beginning of a Crime Story
CHAPTER I
There were deer tracks in the dust, and nothing more. Dia was gone.
He hesitated, looking around into the gathering dusk. She could not have gone far. He called…and his voice echoed, then lost itself lonesomely against the far walls of the canyon.
It was unlike her to walk away, and she had been tired. She had remained behind to rest while he took an exploratory walk up a branch canyon. He could have been gone no more than ten minutes…or fifteen.
He called again, and the echoing voice made him cringe inwardly, for this was a place of silence.
The meadow was shadowed and still with the late evening. There was sunlight upon the mountains, but in this deep hollow it was gone. The parched grass was matted and yellow, offering concealment for nothing larger than a fist.
He called again and yet again, but there was no answer, no sound, no faint reply.
He paused before the boulder where he had last seen her. Her tracks were there, where she had walked up and seated herself. He could see where she had shifted her feet several times, but no sign of her leaving.
Dia, his gentle, fragile Dia…gone!
But where could she go? He called again, mounting worry giving rein to irritation.
Then he saw something else. A small, circular spot in the dust, such a spot as is made by the toe when one rises and suddenly turns.
He lifted his eyes and looked to where hers must have looked. He was staring at a dark finger of woods. A finger of dark trees pointing at the rock on which she had been seated.
Dia had risen suddenly—something had moved there, something that startled her. But Dia was not easily frightened. Slender, fragile, yes…but with courage.
What then?
He walked swiftly, half-fearfully because of what he might find. He was careful to walk wide so as to obliterate no tracks. He paused within the shadow of the trees, straining his eyes to see.
It was darker here but he could make out fallen trunks, a few boulders….He searched among them but there was nothing, simply nothing at all.
Dia was gone.
He called, and his voice lost itself down the empty canyon.
It was twelve miles to the nearest town. Seven miles to the ranch through whose gate they had come to reach this place. He called again, and yet again, walking beneath the trees. It was dark, yes, but light enough to see her body if it had fallen here.
Her body.
His throat tightened.
Then relief flooded over him. Why, what a fool he was! Knowing it would be too late to go on farther into The Dark Hole, she had simply started back toward the car, knowing he would soon catch up!
Wheeling about, he started back, disgusted with himself for his foolishness. He set out the way they had come, then began cutting a zigzag trail to find her returning tracks. He was good at reading sign and at times had followed deer for miles….But there were no tracks.
Only the tracks they had made as they neared the place, that was all.
He stopped again…and called. His voice echoed down the canyon toward the outer world, and there was no other sound. Somewhere, far off, a nightbird called.
Could she have gone on, up the canyon, deeper into The Dark Hole?
Perhaps she felt that she moved too slowly for him, and had gone on. She knew his curiosity about this place, and that he would not want to go back when they were so close to seeing the end of it. It was unlike her….He hurried on across the meadow and started up the narrowing canyon again.
It was darker here, and there were many water-worn boulders, some of them gigantic. He stumbled up, calling again.
His wife was gone. Dia was gone.
Suddenly, he knew. He could not find her. She was certainly gone. He must go out to the ranch at once, call for help, get the sheriff out here with a searching party. It was too late and he could cover too little ground alone. She must have gone away, started away. Possibly she was lying in some crevice now, hearing his cries, her own voice lost to weakness.
No tracks…Now there was a star in the sky. The cliffs had turned to edges of solid black against the pale cloudless gray of the oncoming night. Under the trees where he had searched for Dia there was ominous darkness now. Fear clutched at him.
“Dia!”
His voice rang out against the cliffs, echoed down the canyon and up the canyon in twin voices, weakening with increasing distance. “Dia, Dia, Dia…”
But only his own voice called into the silence, and only his own voice answered, and there was no other sound; there was nothing, not even the wind.
Magill forced himself to think. He forced his mind to be cold. He ruled out fear and doubt. He fought to abandon emotion. To think.
She had suggested waiting. After all, he would be gone only a few minutes, and she was tired. When he was exploring he was always overeager and sometimes he forgot that others lacked his enthusiasm and his physical condition. Yet today he had remembered not to hurry, to think of Dia, to take his time.
He considered the situation. After all, he was a thinking man. It was through thought that Man had risen above the beast, yet at the first sign of fear, of panic, of danger, he was apt to stop thinking and to act blindly, instinctively. And man could in most cases no longer trust his instincts. If he was to find Dia, he must think.
The canyon’s line was roughly east and west. To north and south were cliffs that would be difficult to climb, even for him. Nor could she have climbed them in the time he had been gone. Therefore, she must have gone down the canyon toward the car, or up the canyon and deeper into The Dark Hole.
He looked down-canyon for tracks and found none. He had looked up the canyon and found no tracks either. Nor had he seen any tracks leaving the rock where she had been seated.
The canyon leading into The Dark Hole was narrow and almost floored with boulders. Only at the side, sometimes along one wall, sometimes along the other, was there room for a path.
A path that was a game trail, nothing more. The walls of the canyon were not rock, although there was much rock in them. They were of cretaceous formation, but almost sheer, reaching up for all of seven hundred feet to the rim.
There was some brush on the cliff, sparse stuff, mingled with poison oak. In the canyon bottom there was a mixture of trees, dark pines or oak, with an occasional cottonwood. Once, halting to gasp for breath, he paused beneath a cottonwood.
He called again, “Dia!” It was incredible that she could disappear, but disappear she had.
He stood alone in the bottom of this narrow crack in the earth. He was in the middle of California, but he was utterly alone. There were cities not far away, crowded with people; there were intervening villages, farms, homes….Yet he was alone, all, all alone. And Dia was gone.
There was danger where there were people, but here there were no…But how did he know? Could he be sure they had not been followed? That some unseen madman had not lurked under the trees? Possibly some creature of feeble mind but great strength? He had heard of such things.
Yet he had seen no tracks. Not even so slender a girl as Dia could leave without tracks. And he had followed the trails of rabbit, deer, and wolf.
He was gasping and bathed in sweat. He had a horrible feeling that she might be in desperate trouble, that he might be running away from her rather than toward her. Perhaps she was held silent by some criminal who even now was watching him. But that was imagination. He had no reason to think such a thing.
He started on, then stumbled and fell. He got slowly to his feet, his hands torn by the gravel. He was scarcely conscious of the pain. It was then he thought of a fire.
He would go back to the meadow and build a fire. She would see it and come to him…if she was alive.
He gathered wood. There was plenty of it—no fire had been built in this place for a long time. He put sticks together, and soon had a blaze going. Under other circumstances it would have made a peaceful camp. He was a quiet man, interested in wildlife, in trees, shrubs…open country, mountains, and forest. He had always lived quietly. Violence had no place in his life.
The flames leaped up as he added dry sticks to make a bright blaze. A big fire, that was what he wanted. Yet he was careful, even now, to keep it from spreading. He let a little circle of grass burn off around the spot, letting it spread only a few inches at a time. Soon he had a border of blackness where no chance spark could ignite the dry grass if he had to leave the blaze.
He gathered wood in a pile. He moved away from the fire, listening. There was no sound but the crackle of the flames. He paced anxiously; he waited. He thought of a thousand things. Nothing made sense. Dia would not wander off by herself. She never had; she wasn’t the type. She would have waited for him. That was just it—none of it made sense.
His Dia gone…It was impossible.
Footsteps.
He came quickly to his feet and sprang away from the fire. “Dia!” His voice rang. “You’ve…!”
It was not Dia. Three men had walked to the edge of the firelight. One was the rancher, Rorick. The other two were strangers, but one was obviously a forest ranger.
“Don’t you know you can’t build fires in here?” The ranger’s voice was patiently angry.
“It’s for my wife. She’s gone.”
“Gone?”
“Lost, I guess. I left her sitting here….” He started to explain, trying to talk coolly, to remember everything.
“But that’s ridiculous!” The ranger was irritable. “Where could she go? In this canyon you can go up and you can go back. Unless she could go up the wall.”
“She wouldn’t do that.”
“There was a girl in the car with him,” Rorick said, “a pretty little thing.”
“Look,” the ranger insisted, “if your wife came up here with you she’s got to be here now.”
“You passed my car?”
“It was empty.”
“You passed no one?”
“Wouldn’t we have mentioned it?”
“Then she must be up in the canyon, if she isn’t dead.”
Their eyes all turned to him, startled. The ranger’s eyes seemed to grow more intent. Or had he imagined that? “Why would she be dead?”
“I’ve been yelling. She would have answered, wouldn’t she?”
The search lasted two hours. There were four of them now and they walked abreast up the canyon to the head. They found nothing…or almost nothing.
The head of the canyon was a cliff down which water fell during heavy rains. The rocks there were polished and smooth. There was, nowhere, any sign of Dia.
Returning, they stopped at one place. It was a fresh slide. The ranger, whose name was Bronson, threw the beam of his five-celled flashlight up the slide. It was still somewhat damp.
“After sundown,” Rorick said, “or maybe an hour before. The sun would have dried it out.”
“Maybe.” The ranger walked around the pile and studied it with his light. “The sun only reaches the bottom at midday. That’s why they call it The Dark Hole.”
They lingered, and Magill shifted from foot to foot. Dia…where was Dia? Somewhere out in the dark, Dia who never wanted to be alone, who hated to be alone. She was out there, somewhere alone in the dark.
“Do we have to stand here?” His irritation was in his voice. “My wife may have fallen somewhere. She may be suffering.”
Bronson straightened, brushing off his breeches, taking his time. “Mister,” he spoke slowly, carefully. “Your wife did not come down the canyon. She isn’t, so far as we can see, up the canyon. If she was alive, we would have found her.”
“I don’t think so anymore. If she was dead we would have found her. We’ve been over every inch of this canyon.”
Bronson nodded. “That’s right, mister. We have been over every inch of it…almost.”
He stared from one to the other. “What do you mean? Almost?”
“We’ve been over every inch of this canyon,” Bronson repeated, “except what’s under that rock pile!”
CHAPTER II
Bronson turned away from Magill and began gathering material for a fire. The third man helped, and after a minute or so, Magill did also. He felt numb…shocked. He could not look toward the debris but kept his eyes averted.
Rorick conferred quietly with Bronson, then started off into the darkness. They could see his light bobbing down the canyon for several minutes, then it disappeared.
The third man was short, stocky, and quiet. “My name is Don Matthews.” He moved over beside Magill.
“Mine is Magill. Morgan Magill.”
The forest ranger was squatting beside the new blaze, feeding it with fuel. He looked over his shoulder at Magill. “Not the Morgan Magill? Who wrote the book on tropical birds?”
At Magill’s nod, Bronson turned back toward the fire, vaguely disturbed. If that was true, then what he had been thinking would be absurd…or would it?
He had read the book, and loved every page of it. Here was a man who not only loved birds, knew them well, and understood them, but who could write.
Yet how could one tell? Murder came to the most unlikely places. Considering this big, quiet, easy-moving man behind him, he decided that Magill must be around thirty-five, possibly a year or two younger. And he had been around a lot. Exploring for birds in Borneo, New Guinea, Halmahera, Indo-China and Brazil. Looking for rare birds and studying their habits.
“Been married long?” Matthews asked.
“Four…almost five months. We met in Honolulu on my way home. Dia was there on vacation.”
They waited, keeping the fire going. At last, Magill could stand it no longer, and moving to the rock pile he began lifting away the larger rocks. Steadily, quietly, he worked. Finally, the others joined him. By the time Rorick returned with shovels, all the larger rocks had been moved.
Carefully, taking their time, they began work with the shovels. There was no chance, nor had there ever been any chance of finding anything alive under that pile. Many of the rocks were large and they had come down with great force.
When the pile had become quite small, about to the limits of a small human body, they rested. Bronson rubbed his jaw and looked around uneasily, avoiding Magill.
For the first time Magill noticed the butt of a pistol sticking up out of Rorick’s pocket. It had not been there when he left to go for the shovels. Magill lifted his eyes to Rorick and found the man watching him. He must have seen Magill’s eyes on the gun. After a moment, without seeming to do so, Rorick moved back, farther from Magill.
Morgan Magill suddenly felt very tired. There was no coolness left in him. He was simply exhausted now, emotionally and physically. He backed up and sat down.
She was not under that pile. She could not be. Not his lovely, fragile, beautiful Dia. Not crushed and broken and…
More footsteps…He came to his feet instantly, tight with awareness.
No…they were not light-stepping feet, but the heavier scuff of men walking. Then a bobbing light and after a long minute two men came into the circle of firelight. One wore a badge on his coat.
“Hello, Bronson…Rory.” He glanced once at Magill, then at the pile. “All right, uncover it.”
The men went to work, with their hands this time. Magill sat very quiet, suddenly aware of a new tension, a new feeling in the air.
The sheriff…they thought he had murdered Dia.
He got swiftly to his feet and the sheriff turned on him, his eyes alert, his hand near the edge of his coat.
Magill flushed. How silly could you get? But he said nothing at all. Now they were down…Rorick got up.
“Nothing here, Sam.” With the shovels they moved the last of the debris. There was nothing there. No Dia…nothing.
“She’s alive then,” he said. “She’s got to be alive.”
Bronson looked over at Rorick, frowning. “You’re sure there was a girl in that car?”
The rancher was impatient. “Of course! I brought her a cup of water from the well. Gave it to her with my own hands.”
“Then,” the sheriff asked quietly, “where is she? Don’t tell me she climbed over those seven-hundred-foot cliffs in the dark?”
Magill shifted his feet. “Sheriff,” he said quietly, “it was not dark when I first missed her. It didn’t become dark for almost thirty minutes. I looked under the trees…everywhere.”
“You think she climbed out?”
“I think the idea is absurd. Dia did not like heights. At least, I could never get her to climb. Besides”—he looked around at their faces—“where could she go? And what would be the object of it?”
Nobody had any answer to that. The sheriff moved off to one side and held a low-voiced conversation with Bronson. Don Matthews remained beside Magill. He seemed sympathetic. “You were very much in love?” he asked.
“She was the only woman I ever loved. In fact, she was the only woman I ever knew very well.”
“You must be well-off,” Matthews suggested. “Those trips must have cost money. I’ve read a couple of your books.”
“The trips didn’t cost so much as you’d imagine. I came back from overseas with a little money saved. That paid for the first one. I sold a few articles, then I got a grant from a foundation and took the second. It was not difficult after that.”
“Did your wife have money?”
“Dia? No…nothing. She had been a librarian somewhere in the Midwest before we met. We…we married rather suddenly because she was almost broke and if she returned to her job we would be separated. I didn’t want that and neither did she.” Matthews dropped to his haunches and poked absently at the fire. Magill was a handsome man in a rugged sort of way, but seemed more the scholar than the explorer. Leaving Bronson and Matthews beside the fire in case Dia might be alive and lost and the fire might lead her to safety, the sheriff and Rorick started back toward the ranch. The other man had disappeared somewhere in the darkness.
“Just relax”—the sheriff’s name was Sam Gates—“we’ve done all we can do tonight. By daylight we’ll have searching parties moving in from both sides. That’s wild country but we can cover it. If she got out of the canyon, we’ll find her.”
They returned silently to their vehicles and Magill found himself back at the farmhouse. He paced the floor restlessly, and finally, just as the sun was rising, he fell asleep in a chair.
He awakened with a start. Instantly wide awake and on his feet. He looked at his watch, but it had stopped. He wound it, then checked with the clock in the kitchen.
The backyard was full of men. Not far from the window, which was raised a little at the bottom, was Sheriff Gates. Rorick and several other men were standing with him. “If you hadn’t seen her,” Gates was saying, “I’d say she never existed.”
“Killed her an’ hid her body, if you ask me.” The speaker was a burly, unshaven man. “Plenty of places a body could be hid. I figure that there slide was started a-purpose. It was just a blind.”
They all looked at the man. “How do we know,” he continued, “she ever got as far as the Hole? We saw where he left his car. There’s plenty of canyons open off the trail before you get to the Hole. Has anybody looked in that old quicksilver mine? I say she never got to the Hole.”
Magill backed up and sat down heavily. The sleep had cleared his mind, and he was a man who was accustomed to dealing with problems. He was possessed of two facts of which they could not be sure. He knew his wife had reached the canyon, and he knew he had not killed her. Therefore, where was she?
If her body had not been found, it was not there. The only place where the earth was disturbed had been examined. Hence, if she was not there she had gone away or been taken away.
Yet he had found no tracks and Dia would have been unable to cover a trail sufficiently to deceive him. And why should she wish to?
Suppose someone had come upon her suddenly…But there had been no evidence of a struggle. Unless she had been knocked unconscious. Little by little he began to examine all the possibilities, all the situations that might have arisen.
Again and again his thoughts returned to the slide. Something had to start a slide. It could have been a coincidence, but it was almost too much of one. And it was the only thing in the area that seemed in any way different than usual.
A woman had vanished…and there had been a rock slide. Had anyone scouted the rim above the slide? She might have been knocked out and carried up the cliff. That might be accomplished by a man of unusual strength…but it was improbable.
Turning his head he glanced at his reflection in the mirror. He was a big man with rumpled light brown hair and quiet gray eyes, but now those eyes had dark circles beneath them, and his mouth looked drawn.
Dia…gone.
He remembered how they had met. It seemed like yesterday, and yet…in some ways it seemed a faraway, impossible time.
He had devoted four months of his life to Halmahera in the East Indies…Indonesia, it was now. He’d spent most of those four months in the jungle, away from the coasts, and without with any preconceived plan. He had just started out with four native boys and rambled from place to place.
Returning, he had decided to spend two weeks in Honolulu assembling his material. It would be more pleasant, and he might take a few short trips to the more remote islands and add to his knowledge and his collections.
For the first three days he had held to his plan. He had worked hard, cataloguing his finds, spending his evenings planning for three trips among the islands…and then on that never-to-be-forgotten morning he had taken a walk down the beach.
It was not much of a beach. It was away from the populated centers and actually, it was more of a picturesque shoreline with, here and there, patches of sand.
She had come along the edge of the sea that morning, her skirt whipping in the wind, her blond hair blowing. She was walking toward him, oblivious of his presence, and she was singing a tune in a pleasant, if untrained voice.
She drew abreast of the rock on which he sat, and he applauded. He grinned, remembering her embarrassment. But they had talked, and although she had refused his invitation to lunch, she did agree to have dinner with him.
That had begun it. The two weeks fled by and he forgot the island trips he had planned. They lunched together, walked, danced, worked together. Once she discovered what he was doing, she began to help him. She knew a little of birds…not of tropical birds, beyond a few scattered and largely mistaken ideas about parrots and parakeets, but the birds of her home state, and she had read several articles about penguins. However, it was her librarian’s patience and organization that made the greatest contribution. She could understand the smallest difference in the most insignificant bird, and if she wondered that he was content to pass his life in such a way, she never mentioned it.
When the subject of marriage first came up, he did not exactly remember. It seemed to have been about the time she first mentioned leaving; by that time he was used to her and the thought of her going away dismayed him. Nor could he recall who had first mentioned the subject, but it had remained on their minds, and had come up again.
She had told him, frankly, that her money was almost exhausted and she must return to her job.
His response had been automatic. “Why not stay here with me?” He started to add that he would gladly pay her whatever she was earning at wherever she had been working, but somehow she had misunderstood him and the first thing he knew she was accepting his proposal.
Flustered, he started to explain, but there had been no chance, and as she talked happily on, he began to think of the advantages…a home, Dia…It was more, really, than he had ever expected.
Now, looking back, he was forced to smile at the way it had all happened. Dia…but Dia was gone…gone.
And he was accomplishing nothing. He must get out and join in the search. He glanced at his watch. It was not yet eight o’clock in the morning. He could not have slept more than two, possibly three hours. He had been awake thirty minutes at most.
He walked back through the house to the bathroom and washed hurriedly, then combed his hair. He was thinking again of the problem at hand, and where to search. He would work, as he always did, by himself. He knew where they had been, knew exactly where he had last seen Dia…and he would investigate that slide.
Perhaps she had rested a few minutes, then wandered up the canyon. Frightened, she might have started up the wall. Frightened by what? A snake…a skunk…a steer…almost anything might have frightened her. The slide might have started and she might have believed it was easier to continue on to the top than to return.
Back in the kitchen he selected a cup and poured coffee. It was only lukewarm but he gulped several swallows, then put it down and started for the door.
Passing the window he stopped abruptly.
They had something. He looked again. It was a scarf of Dia’s….
A scarf…but Dia had worn no scarf!
He was a man who gave attention to detail, and he could describe in detail what Dia had been wearing, and there had been no scarf.
Yet the scarf was here; he remembered buying it for her. The scarf was hers—and it was dark with the stain of blood!
COMMENTS: The Dark Hole is in Kings County, California. Louis’s journal shows that he first visited the area in November of 1951. Indonesia, the country of Magill’s ornithological studies, only came into being in 1949, so it seems very likely that this was written by the mid-1950s.
I like the character of Morgan Magill. He’s a more normal guy than a lot of Dad’s heroes. It’s amusing to see Louis commenting:
When he was exploring he was always overeager and sometimes he forgot that others lacked his enthusiasm and his physical condition. Yet today he had remembered not to hurry, to think of Dia, to take his time.
That was Dad. I think most of the memories I have of him when we were hiking were from behind. Dad was always moving on, barely waiting for whoever was with him. He might pause, but as soon as my mother, sister, and I caught up, he would head off again….If we wanted to keep up we didn’t take time to rest, we just kept plodding!
