Harold took the stock of his rifle and banged it against the trunk of the Bone Tree. The wood made a dull thump against the fibrous bark. He watched the black opening for several seconds, then said, “Anything but a snake would have scooted right out of there. And you wouldn’t hit a snake with that pistol anyway. You got boots on. Just give ’em a wide berth.”

“I’m not giving you my gun,” Caitlin said. “I’m sorry. I’ll hurry, I promise. Now, promise you won’t leave me.”

“You gonna pay me the extra five hundred?”

“Absolutely. I’ll pay you an extra thousand if those bones are in there. Hell, you’ll be going on talk shows for the next six months.”

This notion didn’t seem to impress her guide. He flicked his hand like she should get on with it, then turned and gazed out over the water with his rifle clenched in his hands.

Closing her left hand tight around the flashlight, Caitlin inched toward the lightless opening with the pistol held in front of her. She felt like an archaeologist carrying a flaming torch into an undiscovered tomb. The fissure in the tree was tall, and narrower than she’d first thought. A man Penn’s size would have difficulty squeezing through, but she was thin and could pass with relative ease. Pausing on the threshold of the strange doorway, she shone the flashlight’s weak yellow beam into the darkness at the heart of the tree.

She saw bones, far more than she’d expected. Some were white as chalk, while others looked brown and coated with moss. There seemed to be no order to their arrangement. She would have to move closer to understand exactly what she was looking at.

Shining the beam just inside the crack, she saw no snakes on the dry-looking floor of the cave. She sucked in a deep, preparatory breath, then turned sideways and stepped through the fissure.

A small animal scrambled out of her path, and she jerked backward, shining the light around in a panic. A possum stared at her from ten feet across the floor, its red eyes glazed with terror. She aimed her pistol at the gray-furred animal and started to squeeze the trigger, then stopped. A gunshot might send Harold into panicked flight across the swamp. Instead, she moved several feet to the side of the fissure, crouched, picked up a long bone, and hurled it at the possum. The animal started, froze, then scuttled around the inner wall of the cave and vanished through the crack of light that led to freedom.

Caitlin heard Harold laughing softly.

Now that she was alone in the hollow heart of the cypress, a profound transformation overcame her. She sensed the great age of the tree, an ancient, hoary temple of fiber more resilient than any bone. She understood why wounded animals might seek out this silent chamber to die. It was literally a mausoleum, and it felt like one, only without the artificiality of the stone sweatboxes in human cemeteries. In one curve of the round room, it appeared that animals or humans had mounded up earth and moss against the wall.

Remembering the need for haste, she dropped to her knees, set her pistol beside her, and began to examine the bones. Caitlin knew little about anthropology, but she seemed to be looking at a mixture of deer and human bones. Then her flashlight played across the hollow eyes of a human skull lying sideways beneath a pile of arching rib bones, and her breath stopped. Five feet away, she saw another. Something coiled beside the second skull caused her to scrabble backward, then jerk up her pistol and squint into the darkness. It wasn’t a snake, she realized, but a thick rope. Picking up the flashlight again, she saw that the rope was rotted half through. With sickening certainty she realized that someone had probably been bound with that while being tortured.

She gasped as she started breathing again. Forcing herself to relax her diaphragm, she shone the light upward to give herself a break from the horror. What she found was horror magnified, and confirmation of the story Jason Abbott had told the FBI back in 1972. Wired to rusted nails driven into the walls of the tree were enough human bones to make a skeleton. The collection had lost much of its original composition, but the bones had clearly been posed to represent an inverted crucifixion. It brought to mind the cross of St. Peter, but Caitlin knew that Elam Knox’s death was no martyrdom.

She dropped the beam and let it play over the bones on the floor again.

“I can’t leave these here,” she said softly. “God.”

Hot tears slid down her cheeks. She had come here looking to make her reputation, but she’d found something so profoundly sad that it humbled her beyond all thought for herself. As soon as she came within range of a cell tower, she would call John Kaiser. This obscene place was the business of the FBI, not a swarm of ravenous reporters craving the latest titillating story. She pocketed her flashlight and pulled out her Casio camera to start photographing the bones.

“Harold?” she called over her shoulder while shooting pictures methodically. “Could you come in here, please?”

Getting no answer, she looked back at the vertical crack of daylight behind her. “Harold!”

No reply.

She felt a moment of panic at the thought that he’d abandoned her, but then his dark silhouette blotted out the lower two-thirds of light shining through the crack.

“You find what you was lookin’ for?” he asked.

“Yes. I’m going to pass you a skull and a few bones. It’s terrible crime-scene procedure, but I’m worried that whoever’s in that boat might come back and get rid of the evidence before the FBI can get here. Preserving some of this is far more important than any damage we might do. Okay?”

The boy didn’t answer.

Fear struck her like an arrow as she confronted the dark and silent silhouette in the crack. Is that even Harold? she thought crazily. Of course it is. He just doesn’t want to take the bones.

But something odd about the figure’s posture stoked Caitlin’s fear into panic. Was someone standing behind him? Did Harold have a gun jammed in his back? Moving as naturally as she could, she dropped her camera, closed both hands around the butt of her pistol, then shifted her feet so that she was facing the crack.

You’re being paranoid, she told herself. Just take out your fucking light and shine it on him.

When she did, she saw Harold watching her with a strange intensity.

“What’s the matter?” she whispered, trying to look past him. But her eyes had adjusted to the dimness, and the light beyond the door was blinding.

“I’m about to do you the biggest favor of your life,” Harold said.

A spit of flame erupted from the center of the silhouette, and a blazing dart punched through her chest.

Stunned, Caitlin wavered, then fell to her knees, trying to draw breath.

“Don’t fight it,” Harold said. “I don’t want to have to shoot you again.”

From pure instinct, she raised her pistol and fired five rounds at the shadow in the opening. The blasts of her pistol deafened and blinded her, but they must have driven her guide away from the tree, because a few moments later, her traumatized retinas again perceived the blue-gray light of the crack. Every instinct told her to lie down and try to catch her breath, but what remained of her reason argued that doing so would mean death.

Flattening her left hand on the cool floor, she struggled unsteadily to her feet, even as someone turned a giant screw at the center of her chest, driving it into her heart. She nearly collapsed twice, but somehow she managed to stay erect.

Her plan was to stagger through the crack with her pistol in front of her, then take the boy’s boat by force. She told her right foot to take the first step, but more primitive fibers than her cerebral cortex now had control of her brain. After two labored breaths, she backpedaled until she collided with the wall of the Bone Tree, then sat down hard.