McCarty laughed, shrugged, did everything short of actually saying "pshaw." The fact that he did it with humor and a thick gob of charm didn't let him off the hook. He put Anna's hackles up. If she'd had a tail, by the end of the performance it would have been lashing. She kept her misgivings to herself. There were two possibilities: the doctor had a reason for wanting Frieda to think it was all a dream, or it actually was all a dream and, knowing a whole hell of a lot more about head injuries than Anna ever would, he had chosen this method of allaying his patient's fears.

However unsatisfying to the ego, Anna hoped it was the latter. Still, she watched him closely as he gave Frieda a shot for pain. Hovering, a suspicious and sweating guardian angel, Anna realized if McCarty wanted Frieda dead he could easily have killed her in the hours before Oscar, Holden, and she had arrived.

Unless he didn't think she'd wake up.

Unless he didn't think she'd remember if she did wake up.

Remember what? An attempt on her life? Surely there would have been a reason for attempted murder. Hope she would have forgotten that reason? Not likely, not unless that reason had occurred moments before the rock fell, and even then traumatic amnesia wasn't something anyone would count on, especially not a doctor of medicine. In a heretofore undiscovered crack in the earth there was no secret Frieda could stumble on, and it was unlikely, though not impossible, she'd overheard anything compromising. Peter McCarty's too hearty skepticism was making more and more sense.

The doctor left. Anna listened till the sound of his going was gone. "Frieda, are you awake?" she whispered.

"Hard to tell," came the reply.

"Do you have any idea why somebody would want to push a rock on you?"

"No reason. I'm a secretary, for Chrissake."

Anna wasn't sure being a secretary was as harmless as Frieda thought, but she understood the thrust of the comment. And it was unlikely any NPS secrets-as if a bureaucracy the size of the Park Service could actually keep a secret-from Mesa Verde, Colorado, would get her killed this deep in New Mexico. In anything but James Bond stuff, the power of secrets tended to have only local jurisdiction.

"How about personal animosities," Anna pushed. "Somebody on the survey team?"

"No way. I'm a frigging saint. Oops. Make my apologies."

Frieda was succumbing to the medication, and Anna had to quit badgering her. It was her opinion that "frigging" would be acceptable to even the most persnickety spirits; still, on Frieda's behalf, she said, "Sorry, little Hodags. She's not herself at the moment."

If two people know a secret, it is no longer a secret. On long car trips Anna and her sister used to amuse themselves by planning the perfect murder. The catch was always that you couldn't tell anyone, not a soul. And where's the fun in doing anything perfectly if no one else knows about it?

Oscar was the first to pay his respects. McCarty, he said, felt duty bound to tell him and Holden of the change in the patient's condition. His tone left no doubt that he felt Anna had been remiss, as indeed she had. Extenuating circumstances, she told herself as she squirmed under his reproachful stare.

In the way of runaway secrets, the tale spread without any traceable source-each person told one other, someone overheard, someone deduced. Within an amazingly short period of time, Frieda's lucidity went from secret to news.

As the Stokes was moved up the incline, cavers greeted her, welcomed her back to the world of the living. Never comfortable with subterfuge, Dierkz dropped the pretense and answered as best the pain medication allowed until a squat clean-shaven caver from the outside, boasting EMT status, as if EMTs weren't a dime a dozen in this crew, got so officious Frieda became anxious. Then Holden asked the rescuers to dispense with their good cheer and let her get what rest she could, given she was being trundled up a steep slope.

For reasons of his own, which were possibly sinister but more likely intended to save Frieda from embarrassment, Peter McCarty had left the gloved hand and the possible murder attempt out of his report.

Anna had no idea if this boded good or ill. If someone wanted Frieda dead, perhaps not knowing she was aware of the attack would stay their hand. Then again, maybe if everyone knew, it would discourage a second attempt. The whole thing was too much for Anna's beleaguered mind; the ravings of a head injury patient and the paranoia of an admitted claustrophobe weren't much of a basis for a meaningful dialogue with reality.

Shelving these vague possibilities, she put her back into carrying Frieda home. With each step taken, each rock climbed, they were that much closer to getting out. Left to herself, she knew she would set an underland speed record from Tinker's to the surface, but even the creeping gait of their human caterpillar was heartening.

The passage out of Tinker's closed down so tightly a person couldn't walk upright. It narrowed until shoulders and hips brushed the sides. Well back on the balcony, between the Stokes and the cavers derigging the first haul, Anna felt fear rise in a freezing tide. To hold it at bay, she busied herself checking every knot, buckle, and hook on the Stokes. The stretcher couldn't be rigged and hauled through the passage. Given the horizontal as well as vertical twists and turns, it couldn't be passed from hand to hand. At every step of the way it would require lifting over rockfall, easing across crevices, working under projections of limestone. The stoop-walk in front of them would be impossible to rig; consequently Anna assumed Holden would be a while figuring out the logistics. She planned to use that time to compose herself for an interminable incarceration in a very small space.

"Everybody listen up," Holden said, and she felt an icy poke in her innards followed by an irrational anger. Tillman had already worked out the carry. Did the man never sleep?

The cavers, most of whom were crowded onto the balcony or perched like colorful crows on rocks nearby, fell quiet. Those who weren't actively engaged in derigging had their headlamps switched off. Holden moved the beam of his light from one face to the next, and they appeared like actors in the spotlight, each with his own bizarre tale to tell before the curtain came down.

Counting his sheep, Anna realized, and she was put in mind of a long ago and long forgotten Sunday school. Fleetingly, she wondered if Jesus of Wherever counted his apostles with the same half-loving, half-annoyed, totally concerned look, reading people for fatigue, injury, fear-any weakness that could harm them or the cause.

"This passage is one hundred sixty-two feet long. There are only two rooms big enough to stand up in, and there're not many flat enough to set the Stokes down. What we're going to do is turtle it." Judging by the intrigued looks that flickered from the darkness, "turtling" wasn't a classic maneuver culled from the most recent edition of the Manual of U.S. Cave Rescue Techniques.

Deferring often to Frieda to make sure she knew that she was part of her own rescue and not just one hundred forty pounds of packaged meat, Holden talked them through the next leg of the journey. Turtling was evidently a process he'd learned from his predecessor at the BLM. Like many things that worked, it wasn't in the pages of any how-to book. Though to give credit where credit was due, the few books on cave rescue Anna had looked at agreed that the most important piece of equipment in an underground rescue is the rescuer's brain.

One by one Holden sent them into the passage. Half a body length apart, they were to get on hands and knees and pass the Stokes along their backs, a shoulder-wrenching premise, but workable. When Frieda reached the head of the line, the trailing cavers would close ranks like an inchworm taking up its inch. The litter would be pushed to the last two backs, the leading fourteen would spread out farther up the passage, and Frieda would recommence travel over the soft shells of Holden's turtles.