The ladder splashed in the water. It was, he noticed, abnormally muddy. Plenty of time to settle since he had roiled it. In the water, he plunged for balance as his feet settled uncertainly. His torch circled the recesses. All he saw was water, rock and innumerable roots.
A big moth flew through the light beam. He pushed forward under the rocky roof of the edge.
There were fresh tracks. He was sure of that. He was surer still when he could no longer find the one print that had held his attention, the mark of the side of a shoe on a foot that seemed legless. “They” had been in the pit that afternoon, taking the boxes away. But how had they kept from being seen?
Eleanor, because she had gone over to the banyan, must have heard a sound in the woods and gone to look. In daylight he could probably find the marks of her heels. She had gone to look. And that was that.
Where was she now? Alive? A prisoner? He groaned and only the walls answered sepulchrally. His flashlight fell sharply on the stones and threw sharp shadows. The recess was deeper than he’d thought. He waded back. It seemed to turn at a projecting wall.
Following the turn, Duff found a new feature of the sinkhole. An arch of limestone, shoulder-high, spanned some ten feet of water. He leaned and shone his light along its surface. The tunnel, half air and half water, led into the distance in a meandering line as far as he could see.
Some hundreds of yards away in. that direction was the overgrown real-estate development where Harry Ellings had had his furtive rendezvous with the gigantic man. And beyond those cracked sidewalks, cabbage palms and broken lampposts was the old rock pit, now used as a dump.
Sinkholes, if they held water, were sometimes connected, underground, with others.
This one could communicate with the water in the rock pit. In that case, the value of the Yates land to anyone wishing to store desperate cargo was self-evident. Such cargo could be unloaded at night in the old quarry and dragged through this tunnel to the place where he stood. It could then be buried in the soft ooze. And no one watching the house or its surrounding grove of jungle trees would see a sign of coming and going. Duff peered again.
Surely the boxes went out here that afternoon. Perhaps Eleanor also—