This Time Love Read online

  Despite repeated attempts, she’d never been able to find a single passage out of the Voices. Yet the sounds remained, tantalizing, promising new worlds to explore.

  Maybe this time she would get lucky.

  Maybe this time she would see a shadowy corridor or a dark opening that would ultimately lead her to the possibilities that had haunted her since the day after her parents died, when she’d pushed her way through a narrow, unexplored passage on Lost River Cave’s second level and discovered the Voices.

  Nearly seven years had passed since the discovery. Now she had only six weeks left.

  Impatiently Joy pushed aside the looming closure of Lost River Cave. Mourning what would happen in six weeks wouldn’t help her today. She had work to do, years of effort and memories and dreams to wrap up, and she couldn’t accomplish it with tears in her eyes.

  Sounds from the screened back porch and laundry reminded her of all she had to do before she could enter the cave again. She hurried toward the huge industrial washing machines and a dryer that looked like something left by aliens on the crowded, worn cottage porch. Unless both generators were working—which was less than half the time—there wasn’t enough electricity to run camp lights and the washing machines, so everyone tried to get as much cave gear washed as possible during the daylight hours.

  Wearing shorts and sandals, Davy was already sorting through piles of fresh laundry. Nearby a climbing rope rumbled and bumped in one of the washers.

  “How’s the computer program?” Joy asked.

  “Still chewing it over.” He gave a doubtful look to a pair of socks, then decided they probably had a few more miles in them. “The red rope felt a little stiff, so I’m rinsing it with a big dose of softener.”

  “Thanks. We won’t need it today anyway. Fish did several loads of ropes before he went to the cave this morning.”

  “Thought so,” Davy said, looking at the ropes stacked on a small table. “Nobody can snake-wrap those babies like he does.”

  “That’s how he gets out of doing the dishes so often,” Joy said. Braiding or coiling ropes so that they were easier to carry and wouldn’t tangle getting there or while being used was as much an art as a science.

  She looked critically at one of the clean ropes heaped on a counter, waiting for Fish’s deft touch. Washing ropes wasn’t done to make them look good, but to make them safe. Muddy grit left between the strands frayed and cut through them, dangerously weakening the rope itself.

  “Remind me to run that one through again when we get back,” Joy said, dumping the rope on the half of the floor that had been designated for dirty gear. “Did anyone find that backup Gibbs?”

  Davy knew just enough about the technical aspects of climbing to get in and out of the cave safely. Since a Gibbs ascender was a basic piece of equipment, he didn’t have to think about what Joy meant for more than a few seconds.

  “It fell off its storage peg and landed under a pile of rope,” he said. “Maggie found it and laid it out for you with your clean underwear. Of course, everyone else piled clean laundry on the same table, so . . .”

  “That’s what I like about Maggie,” Joy said, flipping through a pile of mesh underwear until she found the ascender. “She’s always thinking.”

  Davy grunted.

  “Hey, sound more grateful,” Joy said, stowing the mechanical ascender with her other gear. “Maggie knew if I didn’t find the backup Gibbs, I was going to use yours and let you practice getting out of the cave one ascender knot at a time.”

  He made a face. “If I’d known that, I’d have turned this place inside out.”

  Quickly and thoroughly Joy checked that her special seat harness was in good condition, as were the various carabiners, figure eight descenders, extra narrow gauge lines—the climber’s equivalent of a hiker carrying spare shoelaces—and all the other specialized equipment that went into cave exploring. Each curve of metal she packed had the subdued polish that came from use and painstaking upkeep. Each rope and line was clean, flexible, and smooth.

  When your life depended on your gear, you took good care of it.

  Besides, for Joy, working over the ropes and lamps, carabiners and ascenders, helmets and rappelling equipment gave her a sense of being part of history. Each smooth steel shape and various kinds of synthetic fiber ropes represented the end product of years of human exploration, risk, and achievement. Cavers spent their lives experimenting with and refining the equipment they carried down into the velvet darkness.

  Her father and mother had been among them, as had her grandfather. Joy had entered her first cave when she was too young to remember. She’d learned to handle the equipment at an age when other children were playing with dolls and toy trucks. When she was older, other cavers had teased her about being her parents’ “secret weapon”—the reason for their success in discovering new passages hidden within well-known caves. It was partly true. Being small was a real bonus when it came to exploring New Mexico’s intricate, baffling, and astonishingly beautiful caves.

  The washing machine switched to spin cycle, made thumping noises, and started shimmying. Joy backed off and gave the machine a solid kick. The washer settled down into normal operation.

  “Fish would smack you for that,” Davy said. “He hates it when anyone abuses his babies.”

  “I won’t tell him if you won’t.”

  “It’ll cost.”

  “How much?”

  “You take one of my cooking nights.”

  “Deal,” she said quickly. Davy was many things, but being a good cook—or even a halfway decent cook—wasn’t one of them.

  “These are yours,” he said, handing over some more clothes. “They have ‘shrimp’ stamped all over them.”

  “Keep in mind, moose, that my written recommendations will follow you for the rest of your life.”

  “I’m shaking in my size thirteens.”

  She caught the wad of clothing he dropped in her hands. Though it all looked sleek and colorful, just holding everything made her sweat. Lost River Cave was always about 58 degrees Fahrenheit, and the lower two levels were wet. Staying warm meant dressing in special high-tech cloth, layer upon layer that wicked moisture away from the body and held heat against it.

  But it wasn’t cold in the summer desert, and that was where all her cave work began—in the desert.

  She shook out the mesh long underwear, full-length pants and shirt, long-sleeved coveralls, pairs of socks meant to be worn one over the other, and lightweight, tough, high-tech boots designed to keep feet dry and right side up no matter what the conditions. The wet suits and scuba gear that were required on the lowest level of Lost River Cave hung in one of the empty cabins, waiting to be needed. But not today. Not even in the next six weeks. Cave diving was simply too dangerous to take on shorthanded.

  “Damn, I hate this part,” Davy said, piling one hot piece of clothing on top of the other and shoving them into his cave pack.

  “It could be worse,” Joy said as she rolled and stashed her own gear.

  “How?” Davy, even more than Joy, sweated just handling the caving clothes in desert heat.

  “In my parents’ day, wool was the cloth of choice. A lot of cavers still prefer it.”

  “Not this one. God, I itch just thinking about it.”

  “But when we’re below, you’ll—”

  “Be grateful for every hot ounce of it,” he finished. “It never seems possible when I’m up here.”

  “Just like the desert up above doesn’t seem possible when we’re down in the cave.”

  He reached for his hard hat, then hesitated when he saw that the battery pack sitting next to it was half empty. “Did Fish clean out the carbide lamps?”

  “Yes, but we won’t need them. The generators ran all night. The rechargeable batteries are topped off. Bet Maggie put them inside your boots, where you can’t forget them.”

  “I only forgot them once and nobody’s let me forget it since.”

  “
Haven’t forgotten them again, have you?”

  With a grumpy sound, he checked his boots and found the batteries.

  Joy grinned. “Like I said, that girl is always thinking.”

  She tugged at the webbing inside her own helmet, checked that the bracket holding the battery-powered lights was secure and that both lights were working at full power. The rechargeable batteries only lasted four hours if she used both lamps, eight hours if she alternated, but the light they gave was steady, strong, and clear. Since overnight explorations weren’t possible with such a diminished group of cavers, keeping batteries charged wasn’t a problem.

  But just in case, she and Davy both carried chemical lightsticks, a spare flashlight and batteries, a simple cigarette lighter, matches, and candles. It made for extra weight, and no caver complained about a single ounce of it. Once beyond the twilight zone at a cave’s entrance, the dark was seamless and absolute.

  As soon as the equipment was assembled and stuffed into personal packs, Joy and Davy carried everything to the worn, battered Jeep that cooked quietly beneath the sun. The Jeep had been Joy’s only legacy from her parents—that and caving skills and a shoebox full of family photos going back more than one hundred years. And love. Her parents had taught her to laugh and trust and love.

  Then Gabriel Venture had taught her to hate.

  Stop thinking about it.

  But she couldn’t, not when he would be here in a week.

  Thank God I have at least a week’s warning. I’ve got some serious work to do on my “game face” when it comes to that son of a bitch.

  The Jeep’s seats were hot enough to sear bare flesh. The lean-to that once had protected the vehicle had rotted beyond repair and blown down in March winds. There was no money for a new structure.

  Silently Davy handed Joy one of the two-gallon jugs of water he had brought with him. Together they wet down the front seats and steering wheel. Everything dried immediately, but at least the evaporating water cooled the surfaces to the point that they wouldn’t burn skin.

  Joy wished she had something as useful to pour on her smoldering memories.

  Four

  AFTER GABE LEFT THE MAIN HIGHWAY AND TURNED OFF onto a gravel road, there wasn’t any traffic to keep him alert. He wished that he’d drunk more coffee to keep him going, and at the same time knew that even a stiff dose of minimart caffeine wouldn’t have done much good. Making a dent in his weariness would have taken enough coffee to fill Lost River Cave.

  For the past fifty-eight days he’d worked nonstop. He’d been awake for the last thirty-seven hours and had crossed so many time zones that he lost track of them.

  The muscles of his left thigh and hip ached, then burned, then sent lancing pain messages up his back and down to his foot. It was time to stop, stretch, walk around, and baby the muscles that still reminded him of the climbing accident that had come within a quarter inch of taking his life. The quarter inch was the thickness of unfrayed rope that had remained after he finally dragged himself back up the crumbling face of the cliff.

  It hadn’t been easy. He’d spent an endless time dangling headdown over a two-thousand-foot drop, banging against granite with each swing of the rope, his weight entirely suspended from his left leg. But he’d been luckier than his guides. The landslide had swept them over and down and down until their screams were lost in distance and grinding stone.

  His article on “Aerial Surveys and Mountain Trails” had nearly been his epitaph.

  He’d spent a long time in the hospital wondering why he’d lived and his guides hadn’t. In the middle of the night, he still woke up in a cold sweat, wondering.

  The steering wheel bucked against Gabe’s hands as the gravel road got worse, then a lot worse. Even slowing to fifteen miles an hour didn’t improve the ride. One-handed, he opened a bottle of water he had bought at the minimart on the edge of town and drank deeply. After the humid Philippines, he had to keep reminding himself that a human being lost water in the desert much faster than seemed reasonable.

  With each twist and turn of the road, memories sliced away at him, leading him back to a time when he’d been a whole lot younger in all the ways that mattered—and Joy had laughed in his arms.

  Exhaustion hit him like a landslide. Even as he shook it off, he knew he should have stayed in Carlsbad, rented a motel room, caught up on his mail, found out what arrangements his editor had made for Lost River Cave, then memorized the names and accomplishments of the people he would be working with. And after he did all that, he should have slept around the clock before he took the rough road to Cottonwood Wells.

  But he hadn’t been able to wait. An irrational sense of urgency rode him, a feeling that he was racing toward something both unknown and unknowable, yet he had to race on anyway, before whatever it was got away.

  So he drank bottled water and ate a stale “deli” sandwich while he fought the road. He was used to pushing himself physically, running on nerve and whatever food he could grab and eat without fuss. The difference now was he didn’t enjoy working that hard anymore, but had nothing to put in its place.

  As the road clawed up the rugged lower slope of the Guadalupes, cholla gave way to sotol, a plant that looked like an agave but was actually a cousin of the lily. Occasional junipers appeared in the northern creases of the land. He noticed the changing plant life only at the edges of his mind. He drove automatically, staring through the dusty windshield as though the answers to all his midnight questions were printed on the hood of his car.

  No such luck. There was nothing but dusty paint and blinding brightness where the sun ran hotly over glass and metal.

  More junipers appeared, and with them the small, rapier-tipped plant known as lechugilla. Curving yet stiff, the point of each “leaf” could wound a horse and punch through a tire or a boot with cruel ease.

  The third time Gabe swerved to avoid a rock that turned out to be a shadow, he pulled over to the side of the narrow gravel road and turned off the ignition. The sun’s thick, slanting light poured like honey over the hushed land.

  Moving slowly, he got out of the car and walked a short way into the desert. It had been months since he had been this stiff. The doctor had warned him that long plane flights and tension would be harder on the tender muscles than anything but going headfirst over a cliff again.

  The long plane flight Gabe could accept. But stress? He had no reason to be so tight. He’d wanted to come home to the States, to explore once again the velvet night of Lost River Cave, to . . .

  What?

  He didn’t have any answer except the tension stealing through him, tightening him even as it drained his energy. He didn’t know what had driven him from a hospital bed in Peru to the Great Barrier Reef, to Tierra del Fuego, to the steamy Philippines and then finally back to a stretch of New Mexican desert that few people knew existed and even fewer cared.

  Memories drew you, whispered part of his mind.

  Dreams, jeered the rest of him.

  There was no end to the inner argument, no end to the tension aching in him, a tension that had begun when he crawled off that deadly Peruvian mountain asking himself every inch of the way why he’d lived and other men had died. What was there in his life worth saving?

  Was he so fine and good and pure and kind that he should live when others died?

  That answer was easy. Bullshit.

  He was an ordinary man who’d been lucky in his career. Not as bad a person as he could have been. Not as good, either.

  And still he asked Why?

  He’d spent his last birthday in a hospital bed, his only present life itself. Trapped by injury, unable to lose himself in the wild lands of the world, he’d explored himself, reviewing the years and his own actions with the slicing, cool intelligence that made his articles crackle with insight.

  But his life wasn’t a mountain or a sea or a mysterious, impossible cave growing beneath the land. Emotions blurred his personal insights, reshaped memories into doubts, turne
d dreams into treachery.

  Still asking Why? he’d come out of that hospital as tight as a rope in the instant before breaking. Then he’d accepted one assignment after another, his only requirement being that each place be different from the New Mexican desert and the wild, incredible cavern that haunted his dreams.

  The woman, too, haunted him mercilessly. Another question without an answer. Another question that must be answered.

  Why?

  No answer.

  Impatient, irritable, driven, he had raged to be in this place but didn’t have a clue as to why it was so important to him. It simply was.

  Finally he’d admitted that he could no more stop himself from coming back than he could walk on water. In some way that he didn’t understand, Lost River Cave had become a mysterious symbol to him. He’d lost or found something there that he couldn’t name, and he’d learned or forgotten something there that haunted his waking and sleeping dreams.

  So he’d called the university to see if he could get into the cave, discovered that the exploration grant was running out, and offered to do another article. Then he’d called his editor at Planet Earth, suggested doing an article on the closing of Lost River Cave, and instantly had been offered the assignment.

  Using the imminent closing of the cave as an excuse for his otherwise irrational need to be back in New Mexico, he left his last assignment unfinished and booked the first flight that would connect to Carlsbad.

  Now the desert wind moved gently over him, ruffling his thick brown hair and tugging at the open collar of his blue cotton shirt. Stretching, he turned his face to the wind and the fiery, descending sun, giving himself to the moment with the intense sensual appreciation that was as much a part of him as his bones.

  The smell of the untamed land swept over him, heat and dust and pungent plants. The spare, almost astringent scent of the desert pleased him more than the thickly layered perfumes of jungle flowers.