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Dead Secret

Dead Secret

Titel: Dead Secret
Autoren: Beverly Connor
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grabbed the rope with one hand, then the other. As soon as she released her grip, her body swung across the opening. The rope caught on the rim of the hole beneath the anchor, sending her under the ledge and slamming her into the thick face of rock dividing the upper chamber from the cavern.
    Her backpack whipped back and forth below her like a frantic pendulum. She held tight as Mike tried to stop the swinging.
    When the swinging stopped, Diane didn’t move for a long moment. She grasped the rope and breathed deeply, rejecting the pain caused from slamming into solid rock.
    “You okay?” Mike peered over the edge at her.
    “Nothing’s broken, as far as I can tell.” She looked up at him and then down at the cavern floor and the length of the rope below her. “I think I have more strength to climb down than up.”
    “Okay. Let yourself down easy. I’m going to secure the rope a bit more.”
    Diane lowered herself, hand over hand, until she reached the bottom of the chamber. Her feet were unsteady on the loose rocks. She sat down and untied from around her waist the line that tethered her backpack to her. Fortunately, nothing had dropped out of it. She stretched her muscles and fingered her rib cage. She’d be sore tomorrow, but right now she seemed fine.
    From where she sat, she could see Mike setting another anchor bolt, securing her means of escape. He then placed a pad under the rope to keep it from fraying where it came in contact with the rock.
    “Thank you,” she shouted up to Mike.
    “No problem.”
    Mike was a geologist at the museum where she was director and was working on his Ph.D. at Bartram University. He was a good friend and caving partner, and professed an attraction to her that left her a little unnerved, mainly because he was so much younger than she. But lately, to her relief, he had been seeing Neva, a fellow caver and a member of the crime scene lab that Diane also directed. And if Diane was any judge of body language, Mike and Neva had become close.
    Diane thought to herself that while she was down here she might as well make good use of the time. She took her distometer, a notepad and bottle of water from secure pouches on the side of the backpack.
    As Mike worked above, Diane picked her way out of the worst of the breakdown and examined the chamber she’d discovered, or perhaps, she thought wryly, that had discovered her. She glanced around and saw that she was standing almost in the middle if it. She measured to the wall ahead—twenty feet, three inches. She turned and measured the opposite direction: nineteen feet, seven inches—thirty-nine feet, ten inches long. Its width was eleven feet shorter. The height to the rim at the top of the chamber was thirty-two feet. Good thing she didn’t know that while she was hanging by her fingernails.
    The twin headlamps on her helmet threw round pools of light on the several stalagmites that stood like sentinels around the room, tall and straight, casting their shadows on the wall behind them. The tallest was perhaps twenty feet. The thought that she might have fallen atop any one of them made her cringe.
    Other than the entrance she had accidently created at the top, the chamber had only one other egress. About twenty feet from the floor on the wall of the cave was a rounded opening leading to what looked like a tunnel. She scribbled down some notes.
    “Ready to climb back up?” yelled Mike.
    “In a minute.” Diane walked around the room, examining everything.
    “That’s what I like about you, Doc. You don’t let a little thing like a near-death experience keep you from having a good time.”
    Diane had hardly heard him, however. The hair on the back of her neck prickled. In her dim peripheral vision she saw the figure of someone crouching behind one of the stalagmites.

Chapter 2
    Diane drew a shallow breath, focused her light full on the figure and discovered that it was not crouching but slumping, its back against the wall, long dead. She walked carefully to it, examining the floor each step of the way, then dropped on her haunches next to the body. What lay before her were the mummified remains of a male, judging from the prominence of his brow ridge and jaw, clad in the rotted remnants of a plaid shirt and jeans turned almost the color of the surrounding rock. With the partial disintegration of his soft tissue, he had collapsed and reclined in a fearful repose, his head leaning back against the wall and turned slightly, his
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