“Sitting” wasn’t exactly the right word for what Stacy was doing. She was slumped unconscious in the chair with her head lolling to one side. Her feet were propped on the footstool and her arms dangled limp with her fingers brushing the ground. Only the chair’s wooden armrests digging deep in her armpits and the chain around her waist kept her from tumbling onto the floor. The chain was looped through a metal hook protruding from the brick wall, stout and strong enough to hold a heavy bucket back in the days when people had lived in these catacombs. Faye could see that Stacy was taking long, deep breaths, so at least she was alive.
A large bruise on Stacy’s forehead was blue-black, shading toward green, and blood was matted in her hair. More bruises covered her hands and arms, and this made Faye wonder what bruises lurked under her clothes.
A clear plastic clamshell container holding half of a ham sandwich was on Stacy’s lap, resting neatly on a dark blue napkin. An open single-serving carton of milk was in the process of adding a square to the water rings to the side table’s surface. Thank God somebody was feeding her, although Faye wasn’t sure Stacy had actually eaten anything in the ten or more hours since she’d disappeared. Maybe she’d only been given half of a sandwich.
Faye reached out and touched the milk carton. It was half-empty, so at least Stacy had been drinking. The waxy cardboard was still slightly cool, so she and Cully must have just missed the person feeding Stacy. Since this was presumably the person imprisoning her, the thought made Faye jittery. However, this probably meant that it would be a while before that person returned, probably hours. She and Cully had time to figure out what to do.
Cully dropped to his knees and took one of Stacy’s hands in his. “Are you okay, sweetie? Stacy. I need you to open your eyes.”
Stacy opened one eye, looked at him, and sighed. Then she opened the other.
“Well, that’s something,” he said. He took Faye’s hand and put Stacy’s hand in it. “You take over here. I gotta do something.”
“Can you talk, Stacy? Can you tell us what happened?”
Stacy opened her mouth and said, “I was—” and her voice drifted off. She tried again and managed to say, “Tried to—” Then she seemed to give up, unwilling or unable to do anything but focus a brilliant smile on Faye.
Now Faye was worried about whether they should move her. She studied the cut on Stacy’s head. It was long, but it wasn’t too deep. There was a small lump beside it, but nothing dramatic. Only her behavior made Faye fear brain damage. Stacy was rolling her head from side to side without apparent pain, making this examination more difficult than it needed to be, so maybe her neck was okay.
Faye saw that Cully was still holding the bolt cutters as he walked to the metal door in the room’s back wall.
“This’ll be a lot easier to take care of than that other lock,” he said as he examined it.
Faye saw that the lock was attached to a hasp that was little more than a flimsy loop of corroded metal. A sturdy pair of tin snips could have cut right through it. Rather than cut through the shank of the lock itself, Cully easily snipped the hasp but left it in place. The padlock hung on to what was left of it, but it was useless to stop the door from opening.
“That’s in case we need to use the back door in a hurry,” he said. “Even if we can get out the way we came, we might need to come back. The person who put Stacy here might not think to check and make sure that the lock’s still in one piece.”
“It’s always good to have options.”
“Yep. Besides, a smart man never lets himself get penned up in a box canyon.”
“Whatever you say. We’re going to have a hard time getting her out of here if she doesn’t perk up, though. It seems like a bad idea to leave her alone and I doubt we have any cell reception down here.”
He checked his phone and said, “Nope.” Then he tossed Faye’s loaner phone at her and asked, “You?”
“Nope.”
He knelt next to Stacy and said, “Don’t worry, sweetie, we’ll get you out of here.” Then he set to work hacking through her chains with a pair of bolt cutters that were barely big enough for the job. They did the trick.
Next, he started pawing around in his backpack, looking for something.
“How did you know Stacy was here, and why couldn’t you just tell the FBI or the police and let them find her?” she demanded.
He ignored her.
“Because now we have to try to get her out of here with no help,” she said. “Or else one of us is going to have to sit here with her while the other one goes for help, and that doesn’t seem like a good plan, because the person who chained her up will be coming back. I’m thinking we have a couple of hours at most, presuming Stacy is getting regular meals. So what’s going on with you, Cully?”
Cully stopped ignoring her, which was progress. He nodded his head several times. “Good questions. Those are all good questions. I can answer them. And I will answer them. Most of them, anyway.” But he didn’t. He just kept shuffling through his backpack.
“Can you move your right hand, Stacy?” Faye asked. The left hand twitched, but then the right one opened and shut. Stacy might be disoriented enough to be confused about right and left, but she could hear, think, and act. Faye was relieved. “What about your right hand? Right foot? Left foot?” Stacy’s movements were awkward, but she followed all of the instructions.
Faye squatted on her heels and eased Stacy into an unsupported sitting position, then she watched her sit up, wavering but unaided.
“While you’re answering questions…or not…here’s one more,” she said to Cully. “What kind of secret is so important that you’re willing to go up against somebody who did this,” she cut her eyes toward the semi-conscious Stacy, “carrying nothing but a toy gun?”
He chuckled. “You knew that gun wasn’t real the whole time.”
Stacy’s back was still off the chair. She was unsteady, but her trunk muscles were firing. Maybe they could move her after all.
“I actually didn’t, not until you threw it at me. But now we’re in some decent light and I can see that it’s a toy. Cully, who did you plan to fool if you had to pull that thing in broad daylight?”
“I’m an actor. You’d be surprised at how easy it is to fool people. If you act scary, they get scared.”
“There’s no waiting period to buy a gun in Oklahoma. You couldn’t take a taxi to the nearest Walmart and buy a real gun?”
“If I was an Oklahoma resident, yeah. I could’ve been in and out of Walmart with my gun in an hour. But I’m not. So I skipped lunch and took a taxi someplace where I could get the other things I needed really fast.”
“The flashlight and the bolt cutters?”
“Yep.”
“The backpack and those fashionable clothes? And shoes? And a toy gun?”
“Yep. And this.” He pulled a bottle of water and a box of cheese-and-crackers out of the pack. “Stacy, honey, you need to wake up and eat.”
Faye opened the water bottle, dampened her hand, and smoothed it over Stacy’s face. Maybe the coolness would rouse her.
“Cully, seriously. Tell me what’s going on. Why did you decide you needed to be the Lone Ranger? You could have had the help of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, plus all of their technology, training, and firepower. What part of that sounded like a bad idea?”
Cully rested a paternal hand on Stacy’s head. “I didn’t know she was missing until I heard people talking after I had my first little interview with your beloved Federal Bureau of Investigation—who I don’t trust as far as I could throw them and their firepower. I knew I had to do something, because I had a decent idea that I could find her. And you see that I was right. It took me a while to assemble what I needed to find her, but I did it.”
“I think I understand why you thought you could find her. You knew the underground passageways because of your mother—”
“Yeah, we used to come down here all the time. We’d explore and she’d tell me stories about when she was a kid. I could probably have gotten here from that staircase at the Gershwin, but the FBI’s had it cordoned off while they do their CSI thing. Besides, I wasn’t sure about what the bomb might have done. Maybe some of the passageways over there caved in after the blast.”
Faye held the crackers to Stacy’s lips. The woman stirred but would not eat. Faye tried the bottle of water and got the same response.
“Where are we?” she asked.
“Pretty dang close to the old part of the Gershwin, actually. See that metal door?”
“Yeah, it’s like the one in the other painted room.”
“Well, it opens into the same storm sewer line, only about fifty feet above the other one.”
Faye remembered her trip through that sewer. She had been so happy to see the other door that it hadn’t occurred to her to ask whether it was the only one. She asked it now.
“Are there more doors like this?”
“Not that I know of. Upstream of this one, the pipe gets too narrow for me to crawl through, so I can’t say for sure. More importantly, we need to get this woman someplace safe. Do you think it’s okay to move her?”
Faye looked at Stacy. She was wobbly, but she was still sitting upright without leaning on the chair back. She did not look like a woman with a traumatic brain injury or a compromised spinal cord. She looked drunk.
As soon as that thought crossed Faye’s mind, she picked up Stacy’s milk, dipped a finger in, and touched it to her tongue. The milk didn’t taste like it had soured, but it did taste really bitter. “She’s not like this because she has a head injury. Somebody’s drugging her. Let’s get her out of here.”
Cully stuck a finger in the milk, tasted it, and grimaced. “You’re right.”
“We’ve got to get her someplace safe, but it makes no sense for the three of us to limp back through both of those big rooms and drag Stacy up to the surface before we call for help. I’ll go and you wait here with Stacy. I’ll call Ahua and tell him where we are, and he’ll send some people to help us get her out of here safely.”
“No, that won’t work,” Cully said without explaining why.
“Then you go call for help and I’ll wait here.”
“No, that won’t work, either.” His face was obstinate.
“Well, now you have me stumped. Why won’t those plans work?”
“Nobody but you can know I was here. I can’t be around when she’s rescued, and nobody can call for help from a phone that can be linked to me. You have to do it from your phone. There are too many questions about what happened to Angela. I don’t want the FBI to know how much I know about these rooms down here, not when it was the last place I ever saw her.”
“That makes sense. Not a lot, but a little.”
“I’m telling you. I can’t be seen. Make a lot of noise when you’re coming through with the Feds, so I can crawl out in the storm sewer and hide.”
“Explain something to me. Until I showed up, you were going to do this alone. What were you going to do? Drag her to the surface and leave her there? See if you could find a pay phone to call for help? There aren’t many pay phones left these days, Cully.”
“Look. There was a big chance that I wouldn’t find her. There was another big chance that I might find her dead and yeah. If she was dead, I bought a burner phone while I was out shopping this morning that I could use to tell someone where to find her body. There was only a little chance that I would find her alive and need to stay with her until help came. If that happened, everybody would start wondering how I know so much about this place. I’d have done it to save this lady, but I wasn’t going to cross that bridge until I came to it.”
“Why can’t the world know, Cully? What’s wrong with having a mother who lived down here?”
Faye watched his face change as he lost control and shouted, “There’s nothing wrong about having a mother like mine! She was an angel here on Earth.” Immediately, his face showed deep shame. “I’m sorry I lost my temper. That’s something my mother never did, not in all her years.”
“What about Angela?”
“Angela? Yes, she had a temper. She was in a powerful rage on the last night I saw her.”
“Did you have an argument?”
“No, that’s just it. I was all by myself in that little cell, scratching a drawing on the wall.”
He stopped himself to say, “I can’t believe it’s still there, actually,” and shook his head.
Then he went on. “If you could have seen the terrible look on Angela’s face. She got that way, sometimes. I always told myself that it was the drugs and if I could get her away from that school and her son-of-a-bitch stepfather, I could get her sober. Anyway, she called me terrible names, and then she turned and ran deep into these tunnels, in the dark. I looked and looked, but I couldn’t find her. I waited for days for her to come back. When my food ran out, I went up top to buy some and I saw a newspaper that said a dead woman had been found in the river. I didn’t know whether she’d jumped off a bridge or whether she’d drowned in the storm sewer. I just knew it was Angela and I knew they’d be looking for me. So I ran.”
Faye wondered how you told a man that he’d spent a lifetime grieving for no reason.
He mistook her silence for judgment. “You can’t let ’em know that I was with Angela the night she died. Getting famous was a stupid thing for a man on the run to do, but it snuck up on me. I went to bed one night as a low-rent extra and got up the next morning a star. I figured it was all over then. I figured the Oklahoma City Police would come after me, but I guess they never put two and two together and tagged me with murdering Angela. I stayed away all these years because I didn’t want people asking me where she was and maybe getting the police all stirred up again. I’d have been on trial for her murder before I knew what was happening. Still would be, I guess. Dear God, the idea of me sitting in California with a bunch of money my family needed has eaten me alive for fifty years.”
Faye tried to speak, but he interrupted her.
“Faye. Help me. There has to be a way to help Stacy without sending myself to prison.”
“Listen. We don’t have time for me to tell you all the details. I’ve got to go for help while you stay here and take care of Stacy. Then I’ve got to tell the FBI everything I know so that we can find the person who did this to her. Just know this. Nobody’s looking to send you to jail for killing Angela because she’s not dead.”
“What?” The bolt cutters hit the hard floor.
“At least, I don’t think so. I know that wasn’t her body in the river in 1962. Maybe she’s died sometime in the past fifty or sixty years, but the FBI knows that she was alive when you left for Hollywood. That’s why they never came for you, Cully. I’ll tell you more when I get back. Take care of Stacy.”
“Take my flashlight and be safe. Stacy and I will be here when you get back.”