Ruby falls, p.8
Ruby Falls, page 8
“You brought a razor,” he says, leaning toward the briefcase.
Ed, still holding his paper sack, glances down at the wooden Gillette box. “I grow a beard faster than I can light a cigarette,” he says. “I thought I might need to clean up for dinner.”
“I tell you what we’ll do,” Jeremiah says. “I’ll shave you.”
“Jeremiah,” Tom says. “We’re in the middle of a game.”
But Jeremiah tosses his last three cards onto the pink-peony pattern of an empty armchair. Both chairs are empty now because the Chattanooga men are standing. The paper bag lands on the carpet with a crackle.
“Let me shave you,” Jeremiah repeats, bending over the briefcase.
He pops the clasp on the box, pulling out the straight razor, and no one stops him. No one moves at all.
“It’s not a pleasure I get to enjoy anymore, you know,” he says, stroking a hand over his thick beard, smiling.
He’s a performer by profession, and that smile can charm an auditorium full of people, but he’s not trying to be charming. The Chattanooga men step back, as any sane men will do when someone waves a razor at them.
“Professor—” starts Ned or Jed, palms out.
“Let’s go on downstairs,” Tom says. “Get some food in you. This isn’t as clever a joke as you think it is.”
He knows “joke” is the wrong word, but he’s never figured out the right one.
“Did you bring soap?” Jeremiah says, ignoring him.
He takes a step forward, and Ed takes one backward.
“Never mind, I’ve got soap,” Jeremiah says. “You sit down, my good sir, and we’ll lather you up and I’ll see what I can do. Go on. Have a seat. It’ll be just like the barbershop. We’ll work up the kind of lather you can shape into a snowball.”
He’s followed Ed until the grocer is pressed against the wall, and he’s got the damn razor an inch from the man’s throat, and finally, finally, the grocer finds his voice and loses his politeness.
“What in God’s name are you talking about?” he shouts, shoving Jeremiah back with both hands, the razor slicing through the air.
Jeremiah grins even as he falls against the armchair, catching himself with the arm not holding the razor. Both Chattanooga men are looking to Tom, and they are doing it, Tom knows, because they’ve categorized Jeremiah as a lunatic and Tom as his keeper and neither of these assumptions are exactly correct.
“He’s not going to hurt you,” Tom says, even as Jeremiah pushes to his feet, holding out the razor like a bouquet of flowers.
“You’re not getting anywhere near my throat,” Ed says, his voice raised.
Everyone’s voice is raised, and Tom is glad for it. He hopes the noise will carry.
“You need to put down that razor, Professor Hagathorn,” says Ned or Jed. “We’d rather not have to call the police, but we will.”
“All I want to do,” Jeremiah says, still smiling, “is to help you get ready for dinner.”
The bedroom door opens, as Tom has been hoping it would. Editha stands with her hand on the knob, her dress belted and buttoned, her hair down around her shoulders. She’s pretty as always, but she’s watching Jeremiah in the same fascinated way she watches armadillos on the roadside. Tom has never figured out whether she wants to cuddle them or run them over.
“You can’t play with other people’s razors,” she says to her husband.
“I’m not playing,” he says.
“You’re always playing.”
Jeremiah laughs. His wife brings out the same giddiness in him that the razor does. She lifts her hand from the doorknob and flicks a finger in his direction, her instructions clear enough. He bends at the waist and drops the razor back into its box.
“Please step away from the briefcase, Miah,” she says. “Make peace. I want to get back to my crossword.”
The Chattanooga men are still as far away from Jeremiah as the walls will allow. Tom catches Editha’s eye and gives her a nod, appreciative. When he smiles, she does not smile back, and if he were an armadillo, he’d keep himself far away from her car.
One Day Later
1932
8:20 a.m.
Ada’s relieved to spot Quinton standing near the roses at the castle. They look to be the only people here, although tables are set up along the lawn, tablecloths flapping. It’s nearly an hour until the big send-off, but she expected other early arrivals.
“Where is everyone?” she asks as soon as Quinton is in range. He’s in a pair of khaki work pants that look washed and pressed, and his beard is neatly trimmed.
“Running behind,” he says. “They’re taking photos. They were supposed to do it yesterday, but they fell off schedule.”
“What happened?”
“Morris and Talmadge ran late hiding the pin. By the time they showed up at the hotel, it was too late for pictures. The magic man was pitching a fit, apparently.”
The sun is lifting over the trees, and Ada holds up a hand against the glare. She was wide-awake circling the kitchen floor when the moon was still bright, and she got dressed before the birds woke. Her nervousness has boiled down now, thicker and heavier. Twelve hours, she reminds herself. You can handle anything for twelve hours.
“It doesn’t worry you that a grown man threw a fit?” she asks.
Quinton steps in front of her, blocking the sun from her eyes. “We knew he’d be a nutjob before he got here, didn’t we?”
Two women appear at the lobby doors carrying silver coffeepots and trays of porcelain cups. They angle themselves through the door and take careful steps down the front stairs, heading across the grass toward the tables.
“Did they tell you where they hid it?” she asks.
“Not allowed to.”
She knows that, but “not allowed” is not the same as “not doing.” Surely not everyone in this group is good at keeping secrets.
“It has to be in the lower caverns,” Quinton is saying. “It’d be over too fast if they hid it around the falls.”
“Did they say why they took so long?”
“They say they lost track of time.”
She can tell he doesn’t believe this any more than she does. Talmadge supposedly knows everything about these caves, and Morris Efrom doesn’t lose track of anything. Over Quinton’s shoulder, one of the women lets out a high-pitched sound as she catches a coffeepot right before it tips onto the white tablecloth.
In the next half hour, the lawn fills up. Leo materializes from the dimness of the lobby, ready to play host. Over these past weeks, he’s seemed nothing but delighted to discover that Ada’s been sneaking around his caverns. Imagine. You as a caver. I thought Quinton was pulling my leg, he said, and then he gave her a hug and that was all. Now he shakes hands and thumps shoulders as men arrive in their Sunday suits, with Ruby moving more quietly through the crowds, offering her own hellos. Women’s hats catch the sunlight in flashes of red, yellow, and green as they stroll up the walk, and children flit like mosquitos, never staying on the footpath.
Ada wonders what they all make of her and Quinton’s bulky pants and jackets. When the professor and his group arrive, they’re not dressed for church, either, of course. They come clomping toward the lawn in their own heavy boots. The woman with them is dressed in caving clothes as well, which is a surprise.
“The mind reader’s wife,” Quinton says. “Apparently, he plans to bring her along.”
There’s something in his tone, and Ada nearly asks him if he’s offended at the idea of a woman in the caves, but Leo’s jogging across the grass to greet the new arrivals, an empty coffee cup dangling from his hand. Behind Ada, a camera flashes.
She expected to be treated like a ghost, invisible, but Leo brings the expedition members over and introduces her and Quinton by name, although he doesn’t mention any other details. No one seems to notice their clothes: Maybe the others think they’ve come in costume for a lark. The professor and his party all shake her hand politely and likely forget her immediately. They have so many hands to shake: A line has formed, snaking around the castle. Ada sees multiple men with notebooks and cameras.
She doesn’t mind being forgotten. It gives her an opportunity to watch.
She studies the slender, long-faced man standing next to the mind reader. Talmadge Cunningham is smiling easily enough, apparently feeling more sociable than when he gave her the cold shoulder on the castle steps. She can’t feel much friendliness toward him. The mind reader, bearded and olive-skinned, keeps scanning the crowd, never quite keeping his attention on whoever happens to be in front of him. He’s as tall as Quinton—surely around the same age, too, early fifties—but where Quinton always makes sure she doesn’t have to crane her neck at him, Jeremiah Hagathorn stands too close. He’s looming over one of the city council members to the point that the other man is arched backward, and he has a belly that might make some of the tighter spots tricky.
His wife is small and dark-haired, with fawn’s eyes, at least a decade younger than her husband. Her heart-shaped face could be on a movie screen, and she’s wearing what seem to be riding breeches. She smiles, closemouthed, at each introduction, as she did when Ada said her own pleased to meet you.
Ada watches her steadily for a few minutes, and she never sees her speak.
The manager is average-sized, with a square jaw and glasses. Each time he shakes hands, he clasps the other man’s hand with both of his. He was the only one who used Ada’s name when she was introduced to him. He turns as Morris Efrom comes hurrying down the lobby steps, catching up to the rest of them. Morris is younger looking than his sixty-something years, and he’s a good friend to Leo. He invested in Ruby Falls before anyone else did, and Ada’s not sure it’s humanly possible to dislike the man. He wrote thank-you notes to every person who attended his wife’s funeral last fall, and he’s run his store so smartly that people say he hasn’t let go of a single employee over these bare-bone years. People say, too, that he’s stopped taking a salary himself.
It’s wise, what Leo’s done. She hasn’t fully appreciated his strategy until this moment. People don’t doubt his honesty, but they think he might be hopeful enough to imagine a miracle. He’s a dreamer, Leo. Morris, though—if he says this psychic demonstration is real, people will believe him.
The newspaperman is barely a man, or at least that’s her first thought. The longer she looks at him, the more she suspects he’s one of those men who never does look old enough to shave. Or maybe it’s only that as she gets older, everyone looks younger. Could he be in his thirties? Anyway, he’s rust-haired and thin, with a too-big Mackinaw jacket and pants that nearly brush the ground. Surely Talmadge will see to it that he tucks them into his boots.
Another thing about the newspaperman: He keeps looking at the mind reader’s wife, who never looks his way once. Quinton, too, watches the wife, and it’s as Ada has always suspected—the ideal woman for most men is both beautiful and mute.
Leo moves the official start time to ten a.m., and Ada and Quinton have barely gotten themselves hidden in the old streambed at the entrance to the falls level when they hear the elevator descending. Soon the elevator door clangs open, metal on metal, and boots scuff against rock.
“Which way, gentlemen?” Morris asks, his voice echoing.
All the men laugh, or at least Ada assumes it’s all of them, even though it’s not obvious why the question is funny. She can’t see anything but rock and Quinton’s pants. The two of them are well-concealed, assuming no one gets a wild hair to crawl into tight spaces only fifty feet from the elevator. The hiding spot is likely unnecessary, since the group will have to come back to the elevator to access the lower caverns, but there’s the small chance that the hatpin will be discovered on this level or that someone breaks a leg. Leo said to stay within shouting distance at all times, so here they are, crouched in the dark.
Sound gets swallowed up in these caves, the rock shutting out voices the same way it does heat and cold. Ada can’t make out any other words until footsteps crunch closer to the opening of their hidden cranny.
“I need you to form a clear picture in your mind,” says a voice. “If it’s blurry, I can’t make it out. You need to envision it as clearly as possible.”
That must be the professor. His voice isn’t as deep as she expected.
“I still don’t understand your process exactly,” Morris says.
“Picture the hatpin,” the professor says, and there’s the snapping of fingers. Three loud clicks with a pause in between, like a musician keeping time. “Picture the item itself and the place where you left it. Picture every detail you remember about its location. Picture the route there. But this next part is even more important: You need to project that image to me.”
Ada isn’t sure about the next sounds. The man is either slapping his thighs or stomping his foot. Maybe he’s clapping with his gloves on. It’s the same pattern: three slow beats.
“The stronger your mind,” he says, “the stronger the image comes through. From my end, it’s the difference in someone communicating with a whisper versus a shout. Mr. Efrom, I specifically asked Mr. Lambert to send a man who was unfamiliar with the caves so that your impressions would be stronger and fresher. He told me you had the sharpest mind of anyone he knew.”
Ada would like to see Morris’s face during this exchange, but when he speaks, he doesn’t address the flattery.
“So if you fail to find the hatpin,” he says, “the fault is with our minds?”
Ada can hear a smile in his voice, a tribute to his good nature, given that the psychic seems to be an utter ass. The man’s whole world is a stage. The voices haven’t been moving, and she imagines Jeremiah Hagathorn is intentionally holding his audience captive.
“If the scouts at Little Bighorn had given General Custer the correct number of Indians,” the professor says, “the battle would have turned out differently. He could not win the battle when they offered up bad details.”
“You’re General Custer, I take it?” Talmadge says.
“If it helps,” Hagathorn says, “the scouts got a happier ending.”
A couple of the men laugh, not much more than puffs of breath, but enough to ease the tension that Ada can feel even through the rock.
“Look,” Hagathorn says, “we’re down here to find a hatpin. My understanding was that you all want that as much as I do.”
A water droplet falls into a nearby pool of water, ringing soft and clear, before the men murmur their assents.
“We do, of course,” Morris says.
“In order for me to find the pin,” the professor says, “you have to do your part. Mental power is as much an art as a talent, and all I’m asking you to do is to work at it. Maybe you don’t believe I can do this, but that truly doesn’t matter. If you envision the hiding place clearly enough, I will absorb it. I’ll recognize the spot as soon as I see it, and we can all go home.”
“And if you don’t believe in him, you will soon enough,” says another voice. “I’ve known him a decade”—it must be the manager, Tom—“and I started out not believing. He saw straight through me. He told me a secret I’d never told anyone, and I’ve watched him do a lot more than that. You’ll see.”
The elevator rumbles: The soft whine that follows is a sign that it’s been summoned back aboveground. Ada wonders if the reporters want to confirm that everyone entered the caves.
“No disrespect intended,” Morris says when the whirring has faded. “It’s more a question of working out our nerves. I’m picturing the hatpin now, exactly where we left it.”
“Me, too,” Talmadge says.
The cave goes quiet. Someone slides the sole of their boot back and forth, a scraping like sandpaper or stubble.
“Can you see anything yet?” Morris asks.
“It’s still solidifying,” the professor says. “I can see the hatpin itself. Maybe six inches long. A shiny bead—gold, maybe? silver?—or some sort of rhinestone, I think.”
Ada assumes the silence that follows the statement means he’s gotten it right, and the men are impressed. She is not particularly impressed, although she knows which hatpin Ruby volunteered for this demonstration, and he’s described it correctly. He’s also described the vast majority of hatpins.
“So do you want to lead the way, Professor Hagathorn?” Talmadge says. “Or you want me to lead? There aren’t any junctions on this level. It’s a straight-ahead path, and we’ll retrace our route when we turn around at the falls.”
“You go first,” Hagathorn says. “I need to focus on my thoughts, not my footing, and it’ll be easier to follow. I’ll call out if I want to stop.”
“And if I say stop,” Talmadge warns, “you do. Without question. If I say duck, you do it. We’re on our own down here, and there’s no margin for error.”
“Watch your head, Jeremiah,” the manager says. “I’ve watched you run into plenty of chandeliers.”
The footsteps start again, faster than Ada expects. The dangling bulbs above the pathway are glowing just as they do for the tour groups, which makes a quick pace easy, but she expected mind reading to require slowness, like small stitches. The professor does not seem to be taking his time.
“Where’s the water in the waterfall come from?” asks a voice she doesn’t recognize.
“No one knows for sure,” Talmadge answers. “It could be surface water that comes through cracks in the mountain. But we know over the years—thousands, millions—it’s flowed through the limestone of the mountain and carved out these rooms. This formation here is the Cactus and Candle. The minerals got dripped down along with the water, and the sediment piles up after a while.”
