“What the hell do you think you’re doing, wandering around on private property?” he asked in a beleaguered fashion, as if he was continuing the conversation from when they first saw each other in the forest and the earth hadn’t just swallowed them both. He sat up and started brushing dirt off his shoulders and hair.
“I didn’t realize I was trespassing,” she said irritably. She tried to sit up all the way and groaned.
“Don’t move. Just stay still for a moment. Lie back.” Through a haze of pain she saw his large shadow hover over her. She felt his hands moving over her upper arms and shoulders. He eased her back to the ground and removed her scarf, carefully placing it next to his knee.
“This shake hole has been collapsing slowly, apparently,” he said as his hands moved over her shoulders and neck. She had the strangest impression he was reading her flesh with his fingertips.
“Shake hole?” she asked, eager for the distraction of his rough voice.
“Sinkhole, shake hole, same thing. This area is riddled with them. It was a good thing this one had already started to collapse.”
“Good?”
“Because of the slow collapse, there’s soil and debris down here. If it’d only been rock, we’d be a heap of broken bones,” she heard him mutter. His hands were moving now over her shoulder blades, along her upper arms, down over her sides, skimming her breasts. She opened her mouth to protest, but there was something so detached—almost clinical—about his touch, that she focused her energy on panting shallowly, trying to catch her breath. He wrapped his hands just above her waist.
“Take a deep breath,” he said gruffly. “Nice and slow.”
Her panting ceased for a few seconds. She realized she’d been afraid to breathe deeply, guarding instinctively against the possibility of broken ribs. She followed his instructions hesitantly. It hurt, but there was no unduly sharp pain. Her lungs seemed to be fully regaining function after the shock of her jarring fall. She heard him make a satisfied sound, and he moved his hands yet again.
He palmed both of her hips and lifted her an inch off the ground. He gave her a tiny twist, shifting her lower body ever so slightly. “Does this hurt?”
“Everything hurts, to be honest.”
“You’re not screaming bloody murder, so that’s something.” He palmed the back of each of her thighs and gently bent her legs in succession, moving each knee toward her chest. She hardly reacted when he bent her left leg, but groaned in discomfort when he did the same to the other.
He straightened her leg and continued his examination—for it struck Jennifer suddenly that was precisely what he was doing.
“Are you a—” She paused to cough some dust and soil out of her lungs. “Doctor?”
“Chiropractor,” she heard him say through the darkness as he unlaced her hiking boots with rapid precision.
“The ground just gave way under me,” she said more to herself than to him. She gritted her teeth when he used both of his hands to slowly circle one of her feet, testing her ankle. It hurt, but not in the shooting-pain, broken-bone manner—more like in the she-was-going-to-be-sore-and-bruised-for-weeks variety.
“You shouldn’t have entered this part of the forest. This area used to be owned by the Black Velvet Mines. The original miners didn’t realize how porous the top layer of limestone is for about a three-mile radius. They eventually pulled out of this area and focused down south, but all the tunnels and caverns remain while the ground above them is eroding every year. Every schoolkid in a ten-mile radius of Vulture’s Canyon knows to stay away from here. A school bus could be eaten up by some of the shake holes in this canyon.”
“I’m not from around here. How was I supposed to know? There weren’t any signs.”
“There are signs. And blockades. You’d have seen them if you stayed on the forest preserve path. You decided to leave it though, didn’t you? You wandered onto my property.” He matter-of-factly stuck her feet back into her hiking boots. Jennifer cautiously sat up, this time successfully, and gently batted his hand away from a boot.
; “I didn’t plan on us falling into a big black hole,” she said half annoyed, half overwhelmed. “Trust me. This is the last place I’d choose to be.”
She began to retie her boot, pausing when she heard a dog bark from above.
“Get back, Enzo!” the man shouted so sharply she jumped. “Go get help.” She heard the animal’s whine. He cursed again.
“What’s wrong?” Jennifer asked.
“He won’t leave me,” he said morosely. “Enzo won’t go get help. I should have invested in a trained dog.”
“Your dog doesn’t have to go on a rescue mission. I have a cell phone right here in my pocket,” Jennifer said, the realization hitting her with a wave of relief.
He grunted. “Good luck with it. The service in these hills sucks. Add to that, we’re about twenty feet underground.”
Jennifer hit a button on her phone. The light from the panel immediately came on, illuminating the space to a surprising degree. She stared around, trying to make out the parameters of their trap. They were in a chamber shaped like a square with the corners rounded off, approximately twenty by twenty feet wide. In one stretch of the cavern, water flowed down a stone wall into a ground-level pool. The other two walls of the chamber were naked limestone, but at the fourth there was a large pile of debris, soil and splintered wooden planking.
“It looks more like a cave than a mine,” she mumbled. “Except for the wooden beams over there. That looks like a collapsed mine tunnel, all right.”