She looked crestfallen. “I guess you would, yeah. Darn, but I would’ve loved to see a new cave! Well, at least we’re stopping by Mammoth Caves on the way back, right?”
“I promised, didn’t I? Didn’t I know you were a caver? Just didn’t want to stop on the way up, we’d have spent a day and a half there, I know you.”
She nodded, grinning sheepishly.
“Anyway, this isn’t helping us check out the real signals. I’ll have to clean ’em up from the interference here, start trying to sort out different patterns, all that, and then correlate them with tremors in the area.”
“Right, right. It’s running good now.”
“Sure is.”
We left SUITS to gather data for a while, and went to join Adam, who’d invited us to go fishing. While fishing wasn’t Jodi’s favorite thing, she was a good sport about it. Me, I was just glad to have a distraction while I recovered from yet another near miss.
That evening, I filled in Father, Helen, Grandpa, and Adam on our discovery.
“By thunder, that explains it! No wonder they almost never tread on the home ground!”
Father nodded. “Good thing.”
Couldn’t argue with that. I’d seen what the back of the storage shed looked like. If that was what they could manage in a desperate raid, half blind and stretched to the limit, I hated to think what would have happened if they hadn’t been slowed up.
After everyone went to bed that evening, I had my own portable crunching away at the signals. There were some interesting patterns turning up. I was trying various signal envelopes, filters, and so on to see if I could make any sense of them. They were clearly signals, not random noise, but it’s always hard to figure out what a given signal is if you don’t have a prior reference point. And these were pretty faint; processing could pull them out of the noise floor, but they weren’t big, clear signals that I could rely on correlating with something else. Something about their general patterns seemed vaguely familiar, but the familiarity just wouldn’t gel. Oh, well, I’d figure it out eventually.
It was the middle of the next morning that Jodi came running out of the house to where Adam, Father, and I were doing maintenance on the generators. “Clint! Clint, come on! You have to see this!”
“What?”
“Come on! You’ll love it! I was looking over the whole signal plot and I think—well, never mind, we’ll see when we get there!”
I looked at Father and Adam. They’d looked interested when she first came over, but their eyes started to glaze over when she said “signal plot.” Father gave a tolerant nod and let Jodi drag me off.
To my surprise, we went straight past the house and started up Cold Breeze Hill. “Hey, I thought you found something on the plot!”
“I did!”
I followed her, a sense of foreboding building as we went up. Her footsteps slowed as she found herself walking a well-defined path, worn by feet that had climbed those very stones hundreds—maybe thousands—of times since the dawn of the nineteenth century.
Her eyes narrowed and I swallowed. “I found a signal pattern that seemed to indicate that a cave came very near the surface here,” she said quietly as she continued to walk.
I was silent. We rounded the last corner, passing between Winston’s Gap—two huge boulders that forced you to walk single-file.
And there it was, a yawning hole in the ground with the massive iron grate secured across it with a heavy steel bar and chained with a hardened steel padlock. The big metal sign across it blazoned Slade Family Property. Keep Out.
Jodi stared at the barrier, large enough to make a decent bank vault, and finally turned to me. “Okay, Clint. What in hell is going on here?”
I closed my eyes. Was there any way . . . ?
Not a chance, I answered myself. Too many mysteries, and this one just couldn’t be explained away. Not with her caving enthusiasm and my evasion of the subject only yesterday.
“I think you’d better come back to the house. We’ve got a lot of talking to do.”