“Oh, honestly, Jack.”
“Yes, honestly.”
Olivia laughed and held open her arms.
Thirty-Three
“Where are you taking me?” Tanni asked, standing at the edge of the highway some distance outside town. Cars streaked past her, kicking up rain water, splashing the backs of her pant legs.
“I want to show you something.” Shaw had parked his car and already started walking into the woods. “Come on,” he urged.
“Where?” she demanded a second time. Shaw had been acting so strange and secretive and that wasn’t like him.
“Back here.”
“In the woods?” She looked down at her new boots and sighed. The dense forest floor would be muddy and wet. If these got ruined, her mother wasn’t likely to buy her another pair.
Instead of arguing with her, Shaw rushed back and grabbed her hand.
“Why all the secrecy?”
“You’ll know why once you get there.”
“This better be good,” she muttered. Her feet made squishing sounds in the damp earth.
“I’ve only ever told one other person about this.”
In other words, whatever this was, the fact that he was showing it to her was a sign of his trust. Her boots sank deeper into the mud but she refused to look at them. If Shaw was willing to share something he considered important, she didn’t care how far she had to walk into the woods or how many pairs of boots she had to ruin.
“It’s all the way back here?” she asked when they’d gone about a hundred feet. Tree limbs hung low, admitting very little light. Despite the darkness and the lack of a clear path, he seemed to know exactly where he was going.
“Not much farther,” he assured her, his hand still clutching hers.
“Shaw!” she cried, grabbing his arm with her other hand when she nearly slipped on a fallen branch covered with moss.
He held her about the waist and kept her from falling. “Be careful,” he said.
They continued at a slower pace. Tanni glanced over her shoulder and discovered that the road was completely out of sight. She couldn’t even guess where he was leading her. Perhaps there was an abandoned cabin nearby or a—
“We’re here,” he said.
Tanni looked around and didn’t see anything unusual or different. Thinking she might have missed something, she turned in a complete circle. “We’re where?” she asked.
“I found this years ago when I was a kid,” Shaw explained. He started to drag a heavy branch away. He removed three such branches, which he’d apparently arranged to hide the opening of a cave.
He stood back and grinned, making a sweeping motion with his arms. “Ta da!”
She’d lived in this area nearly her entire life and she’d never heard anything about caves. Her brother, Nick, would’ve loved exploring here. He’d never mentioned it, either. “Does anyone else know about it?”
“I doubt it,” he said. “because it’s state land. As far as I can tell, no one had been inside for years.”
“How’d you find it?”
Shaw stared down at his feet. “When I was eight, I joined Cub Scouts. We were on a hike down here near Lighthouse Point and I got separated from the rest of the pack. Pretty soon I was lost.”
“In other words, you don’t have a good sense of direction.”
He shook his head. “In other words, I wasn’t paying attention. Nothing wrong with my sense of direction.”
“That’s when you found it?”
“Yup. It’d started to rain and I went inside and waited until I heard someone call my name. Then I ran out and met up with the others. I never told any of them, though.”
“Why not?” She didn’t understand his reason for keeping it a secret. This was an exciting discovery, and if she’d been the one to come across it she would’ve shared it with the world.
“The other kids were teasing me about getting lost and it made me mad so I didn’t tell them what I’d found.”
“But you said you told one other person….”
He nodded. “The night Anson ran away, I brought him here,” he began. “It took me a while to locate it again, but eventually I did. Anson stayed in the cave for two days until I could find a way to get him out of Cedar Cove.”
“You did that for him,” she breathed. Shaw would’ve been in real trouble if anyone had caught him with Anson. She knew Shaw had bought him a bus ticket in Seattle, then driven him there.
“He’s a good friend, the best I ever had. Until you.”
His words nearly brought her to tears. Tanni had never had a friend like that, a friend who’d take risks for her. In her universe, friendship had meant exchanging insignificant secrets and chattering about boys.
“It was the only hiding place I could think of. He promised he’d never tell anyone about it and he hasn’t.”
“Not even Allison Cox?”
“I don’t know what he told Allison, but I can guarantee you he didn’t mention the cave.”
“But…you’re showing me.”
“Yes…I came back here myself a little while ago.” He reached for her hand and led her inside, warning her to duck at the entrance.
Within seconds, they were plunged into darkness. Shaw took out a small flashlight attached to his keychain and turned it on. The cave’s ceiling was maybe ten feet high and they could stand up easily. Tanni saw that he’d cut arched slots into the hard clay. A large candle was positioned in each. He lit the first candle and the cave was dimly illuminated. Then he moved along the walls, lighting other candles. Each one added more light. The candles burned steadily, and she noticed the melted wax that had dripped down the sides, which told her someone had spent hours inside this cave.
“Anson made these candle holders,” Shaw explained. “Two days is a long time when you don’t have anything to do.”
“The darkness must’ve freaked him out.”
“Yeah. He asked for candles and I got them for him. It was his idea to set them in the walls of the cave.” He shrugged. “Kind of primitive, but I got him a couple of flashlights, too.”
She also saw a plastic-covered sleeping bag and a portable camp chair, obviously “furniture” he’d brought in for Anson.
“You said you came here recently. Why?”
Shaw took her hand again. “My dad and I got into it last weekend. He wants me to go to law school. He says he’s worked his whole life to build up his firm so he could pass it on to me. If I want to piddle around drawing faces, that’s a nice hobby, but it’s no career.”
“Oh, Shaw.”
“We’ve argued before but this was the worst. He…he kicked me out of the house. He said either I go to college or I’m not welcome to live in his house.”
This was the first time he’d mentioned the fight. Earlier in the week she’d realized something was bothering him, but when she’d asked, he’d brushed her questions aside and assured her nothing was wrong.
“So you came here?”
Shaw nodded. “I spent one night here and about froze to death.”
Tanni covered her mouth with her hand.
“In the morning I called my mom and she said she’d talked to my father and I should come home. I did and I…I told my dad I’m taking my GED. That seemed to appease him for now. He gave me until the first of the year to make a decision about college.”
“You can spend Christmas with me if you want,” Tanni said. Her mother had already agreed.
“I…might. Let me see how things go at home, okay?”
“Sure.” Tanni hated knowing he’d been alone in this cave for even one night.
As if reading her thoughts, Shaw said, “I didn’t sleep much when I was here.”
Tanni shivered. “I can imagine.”
“I didn’t mind it during the day—maybe because I knew it was still light outside.”
“What’d you do that night?”
“I used my sleeping bag—” he pointed to it “—and I tried to start a fire near the entrance. I couldn’t, though, because the wood was too damp. After a while, I got cold and bored, so I decided to explore.”
“At night?” Not that there was much difference between day and night inside the cave.
“It was closer to morning. I had my flashlight and I found that this cave leads into another one and then another one. That’s when I saw it.”
“Saw what?” She had to admit her curiosity was piqued.
His hand closed more tightly around hers. “You’ll see.” He led her a few steps and stopped. “Just promise me you won’t freak out.”
“I won’t.” She wasn’t the type to faint because she saw a spider or even a bat. She figured his big find was something along those lines, since she knew bat colonies lived in caves.
“Good.” He kissed her and his lips were cold against hers.
When he broke away, he said, “Sometimes…” But he let the rest drop.
“Sometimes what, Shaw?”
He shook his head. “I’ll tell you later.”
“Tell me now,” she urged, wrapping her arms around him.
He exhaled, closing his eyes and pressing his forehead against hers. “Sometimes when I’m drawing, I think about the two of us working together. Both of us artists…”
The image blossomed in Tanni’s mind. At first being inside the cave had felt a bit frightening. It didn’t when Shaw kissed her. “I’d like that,” she said warmly.
He kissed her again.
This time Tanni broke it off. “You were going to show me something, remember?”
“Oh, yeah, I remember.” He was breathing hard.
“First tell me—is it good or bad?”
He grimaced. “Bad.”
“Bad,” she repeated. “How bad? In what way?”
“You’ll see.” He paused. “I wasn’t going to tell anyone. But I called Anson and he said I couldn’t ignore it. I decided he’s right.”
Tanni was beginning to feel anxious; his tension was definitely communicating itself to her. Why was he being so mysterious?
“You ready?” he asked.
“Ready as I’ll ever be,” she said, with no idea what to expect.
“Don’t be afraid, okay?”
“There’s no one else here, is there?”
He hesitated before he answered. “No.”
He pulled a flashlight out of a heavy plastic bag in the corner. Then he took her hand, fingers tight around hers, and led her deeper into the cave’s interior. The light bounced against the sides, creating eerie shadows that seemed to loom over them.
As they moved forward, her feet made splashing sounds, and she began to tremble. If it was from the cold or from anxiety, she couldn’t tell.
They ducked around a corner and into a smaller cave, and Tanni stopped.
“How’re you doing?” Shaw asked.
“I…I don’t know. How much farther is it?”