LOOKS LIKE ALEKSEI’S TINY HOUSE isn’t so tiny after all,” I said, shining my flashlight through the fireplace trapdoor into the enormous cavern below.
“Whoa, he must have built the cabin right on top of an entrance to a natural cave system.” Joe stepped onto the rope ladder attached to the inside wall. “Here goes something.”
“Be right down,” I called, as Joe reached the bottom. First I wanted to close the cabin’s front door so as not to tip off anyone who might be tracking us. A gust of breeze carried the smell of forest flowers into the cabin. That and skunk.
I shook off my sense of unease and followed Joe through the trapdoor. A second chain dangled next to the ladder. I gave it a tug and the trapdoor closed back up again. Aleksei sure made inventive use of all those decades of mountain seclusion.
The cavern was ten times the size of the cabin and three times as high, with an arched opening at one end that looked like it might lead to a side passage. There was a handmade bed at the other end of the cavern, along with jars of preserved and dried food and a few cracked glass jugs that might have once contained water. Partially burned candles had been set into little cubbies in the cavern walls.
“Looks like this was Aleksei’s doomsday cave,” Joe said. “And from the look of these boot tracks, he wasn’t the only one to use it.”
“Someone else has definitely been here very recently,” I agreed, noting how the dirt had been swept aside near the bed as if someone had pushed it and then moved it back—which was exactly what I did next.
Hidden underneath was a square hole about four inches by four inches in size. Nestled inside was a little wooden chest.
“I think you’ll want to see this,” I called to Joe, who was exploring the opening on the other side of the cavern.
I waited until he was by my side to pull the box from the hole and lift the lid. I knew instantly from the rainbow twinkle of prismatic light that refracted back when Joe’s flashlight hit it that this was where Aleksei’s demantoid garnets had been. Why do I say had been? Because the only thing left was some sparkling green garnet dust at the bottom of the box.
“The gems are gone,” Joe said. “And I think I know who took them.”
He shined his light down at the boot prints leading away from the garnets’ hiding spot. “I noticed a pattern in the boot tracks over by that opening.”
The pattern jumped out at me now that I knew to look for it. “The right boot makes a distinct track, while the left boot leaves a slight drag mark behind it.” I took a second to think about what it meant. “Whoever was here had a limp.”
Joe nodded at me encouragingly. Then I had it. “Dr. K!” I declared. I walked toward the opening, trying to discern more clues from the boot prints.
“The tracks move around the cave like he was here for a while before leaving. We know from the one-way tracks in the cabin that he came in the front door but didn’t exit,” I deduced. I shined my light into the opening, illuminating the entrance to a naturally occurring subterranean tunnel that twisted out of the cavern into darkness. “This tunnel passage is the only other exit I see. Dr. K must have gone down here—wherever it leads.”
“You don’t think Dr. Kroopnik could have stolen the garnets for himself, do you?” Joe asked. “He’s Aleksei’s best friend.”
“I—I don’t know. This wouldn’t be the first time someone staged their own disappearance on Black Bear Mountain in order to get away with a crime. It’s straight out of Aleksei’s playbook, actually. We’re going to have to locate Max to find out.” I turned my flashlight back toward the tunnel opening.
We were both stepping in that direction when the sound of the cabin door closing carried down to us from above. We froze and looked up at the trapdoor. What we heard next was the muted thud of footsteps on the cabin’s plank floor. There was also a slight draft of breeze drifting down into the cavern from the fireplace. It carried with it the unmistakable odor of skunk.
“That sure doesn’t sound like a skunk,” Joe whispered nervously.
It suddenly hit me why the faint odor of skunk we kept smelling on the bushwhacking trek to the cabin had unsettled me so much. It wasn’t skunk we were smelling. It was whoever had gotten sprayed by the skunk we’d run into in Dr. K’s research station.
“That has to be the perp who ransacked Dr. K’s lab,” I whispered with a sinking feeling in my gut. “They must have been tracking us from a distance with binoculars the whole time. We led them right here.”
Joe winced at our gaffe. “It’s not going to take Stinky long to see the tracks going in but not out and reach the same conclusion we did about the trapdoor in the fireplace.”
The footsteps stopped right at the fireplace. The next thing we heard was the cold metallic CLICK-CLACK of a gun being racked.
I gulped. My Swiss Army knife and Joe’s hatchet weren’t going to do us much good against a gun-wielding assailant.
“Time to make our exit,” Joe said, echoing my thoughts.
“Hopefully the exit is down here,” I said, making a beeline for the opening. “Because that’s our only option.”
Our footsteps echoed off the stone walls as we snaked our way through the narrow tunnel toward an unknown destination.
“I see light!” Joe called a few minutes later as the sound of the perp’s footsteps began to echo into the underground lair from somewhere behind us.
Sure enough, there was an exit straight ahead. Vines cascaded over it from the outside like a natural curtain, disguising it from view. A handmade wooden grate that Aleksei must have used to keep animals out had been pushed aside.
“Freedom!” I exclaimed, my heart lightening as I parted the vines, allowing the fresh breeze to sweep away the stale cave air and sunlight to pierce the darkness, temporarily blinding me.
“Um, by freedom, did you mean the side of a sheer cliff with no way down?” Joe asked dubiously from behind me as I blinked the spots away from my eyes.
I instantly wished I hadn’t, because I was looking straight down at a fifty-foot drop into a canyon filled with sharp rocks.