Velocity

and Lanny’s meant they were never like brothers, although they lived in the same house. Besides, Lanny had always been self-contained and when not on duty with the sheriff’s department had lost himself in his cartooning.
    The two of them had been friendly enough. And occasionally Lanny could be an engaging honorary uncle.
    On one such day, Lanny had involved Billy in an attempt to determine the depth of the vent.
    Although no young children played on the brambly knoll, Pearl worried for the safety of even imaginary tykes. Years earlier, she’d had a redwood frame bolted to the stone rim of the vent. A redwood lid was screwed to the frame.
    After removing the lid, Lanny and Billy began their research with a handheld police spotlight powered off a pickup-truck engine. The beam illuminated the walls to about three hundred feet but could not find the bottom.
    Past the mouth, the shaft widened to between eight and ten feet. The walls were undulant, whorled, and strange.
    They tied one pound of brass washers to the end of a length of binder twine and lowered them into the center of the hole, listening for the distinctive ring of the discs meeting the vent floor. They only had a thousand feet of twine, which proved inadequate.
    Finally they dropped steel ball bearings into the abyss, timing their fall to a first impact, using textbook formulae to calculate distance. No bearing ever hit short of fourteen hundred feet.
    The bottom did not lie at fourteen hundred feet.
    After that long vertical drop, the vent apparently descended further at an angle, perhaps more than once changing direction, too.
    After the hard clack of the initial strike, each bearing ricocheted from wall to wall, rattling on, the noise never suddenly coming to a stop but always fading, fading until it dwindled into silence.
    Billy guessed that the lava pipe was miles long and descended at least a few thousand feet under the floor of the valley.
    Now, by the glow of the flashlight, he used a battery-powered screwdriver to extract the twelve Phillips-head steel screws that held the redwood lid—a more recent one than they had removed almost twenty years ago. He slid the lid aside.
    No draft rose out of the hole. Billy could smell nothing but a faint cindery scent, and under that the vaguest hint of salt, a whiff of lime.
    Grunting with the effort, he hauled the dead man out of the SUV and dragged him to the vent.
    He wasn’t concerned about the trail he left through the brush or about the trail the Explorer had left. Nature was resilient. In a few days, the disturbance would not be obvious.
    Although the dead man might not have approved, given his status as a former member of the Society of Skeptics, Billy murmured a brief prayer for him before shoving his body into the hole.
    Ralph Cottle made a lot more noise going down than had any of the ball bearings. The first few impacts sounded bone-shattering.
    Then the slippery tarp produced an eerie whistling sound as the tunnel angled from the vertical and the plastic-wrapped mummy slid at increasing velocity into the depths, perhaps spiraling around the walls of the lava tube as a bullet spirals along the grooved barrel of a gun.
     
     
     

Chapter 48
     
    Billy parked the explorer on the lawn behind the garage, where it could not be seen by any motorist who might use the dead end of the lane as a turnaround. He worked his hands into latex gloves.
    With the spare key that he had taken from the hole in the oak stump little more than nineteen hours earlier, he let himself into the house through the back door.
    He had with him the tarp, the strapping tape, the rope. And of course the .38 revolver.
    As Billy moved forward through the ground floor, he turned on lights.
    Wednesday and Thursday were Lanny’s days off, so he might not be thought missing for another thirty-six hours. If a friend dropped by unannounced for a visit, however, saw lights in the house, but could not get an answer to the doorbell, trouble would follow.
    Billy intended to do what needed to be done as quickly as possible and get out, turning the lights off after himself.
    The cartoon hands, pointing the way to the corpse, were still taped to the walls. He would remove them later, as part of the cleanup.
    If Lanny’s body had been salted with evidence pointing to Billy, as Cottle said that Giselle Winslow’s had been, none of it could be used in a court of law if Lanny lay forever at rest a mile or more under the earth.
    Billy