In Cave Danger

Book 5: Pacific Northwest Mystery

by Kate Dyer-Seeley

Genres: Amateur Sleuth; Cozy Mystery; Female Sleuths

Synopsis

On an expedition into Oregon’s Lava River Cave, outdoor journalist Meg Reed stumbles across a body buried way more than six feet under . . .
 
A debate is raging over the use of public lands, and to cover the story for Northwest Extreme magazine, Meg joins a congressman and several others on a subterranean adventure—despite her intense claustrophobia. The thoughts of cave-ins and cougars are unnerving, but at least it’s a distraction from her other anxieties, like her best friend’s departure for Italy, her boss’s plan to sell the company, and the ongoing questions about her father’s suspicious death. But in the chilly darkness of the volcanic rock, she discovers a Forest Service employee, stabbed with a trowel. Now Meg will need to do some in-depth investigating or the truth may never come to the surface . . .
 
PRAISE FOR SCENE OF THE CLIMB
 
“A splendid overview of the greater Portland and Columbia River Gorge region, perfect for travel buffs. Her protagonist shows promise with her determined attitude and moxie.” —Library Journal

“A fun, terrific adventure.”—Suspense Magazine

INCLUDES ADVENTURE GUIDES!

Publisher: Kensington Books

Print pages: 352

Sample

Darkness closed in with each step. I clutched the cool steel hand rail. It felt like ice. The catwalk wobbled under my feet as the last sliver of sunlight evaporated behind me. How secure were the old rickety steps? And how much farther down did I have to go?

Blackness stretched as far as I could see. The only light in the deep cave came from my headlamp. It cast an eerie yellow halo on the tubular rock wall. I cinched my pink Columbia jacket tighter and inched onward. Despite the fact that temperatures were expected to break heat records later in the day, the temperature in the lava cavern was a brisk forty-two degrees.

I tried not to look ahead, keeping my light focused on my pink hiking boots and the metal grate below my feet. One misstep and I could easily plummet to one of the many giant and jagged boulders on the cave floor. My breath looked like a wispy ghost in the reflection of my light, and I could hear my heartbeat thump in my head. What was I thinking? Why had I signed on to explore Oregon’s longest lava tube?

Have I mentioned that I’m extremely claustrophobic? Tight spaces are not my friends. As if the dark and cold weren’t enough, this was just the beginning of our descent. I knew from my research that the ancient lava flow stretched for a mile and would take us more than 150 feet and deep underground.

I shuddered. This was a mistake. A big mistake.

Classic move, Meg, I scolded myself. You got yourself into this expedition. Now you’re going to have to see it through. If a team of expert cavers and Oregon’s most senior congressman weren’t behind me, I would have bolted, but there was no turning around now.

The sound of someone clearing their voice behind nearly made me trip. “Hey! What’s the hang-up in the front?” It was Dupree, an adrenaline junkie who worked part-time for the Forest Service as a cave guide.

I wished that Kira was here. Kira was Dupree’s official boss. She was the director of the Forest Service Department in Bend, Oregon, and knew every inch of the lava cave. Unlike Dupree, her idea of exploring the caves meant taking things slow and steady. She never would have pushed me to move faster, especially on the dangerous steps that were the only route in or out of the cave.

“Keep moving, Meg!” Dupree yelled from behind. “We’ve got maybe ten or twenty stairs to go.”

I was almost to the bottom. Thank God.

However, I wondered if he had been messing with me when he suggested that I go first.

“You lead the way, Meg,” he had said as he tightened the string on his army green ranger hat while we gathered around him at the bright and sunny cave entrance. “We’ve got some dudes with long legs in our group. You’re the shortest, so you can set the pace.”

It had sounded like a logical plan, but I was moving so slowly that I had created a bottleneck on the stairs.

At that moment my foot slipped. I reached out and caught my hand on the damp cave wall. Had I made it to the bottom? Using my other hand as a shield I cautiously stepped forward. My foot landed on solid rock. Yep. I was down. Thank goodness. I said a silent prayer to the Universe and retrieved my handheld lantern from my pack. Kira had insisted at our safety meeting last night that we have at least two light sources with us in the cave. I took her instruction to heart and had packed an extra lantern and flashlight. There was no way I was taking a chance of having to traverse the cave in the dark. Plus, I was here on assignment for Northwest Extreme. I needed as much light as possible to take pictures of the massive volcanic wonder that had formed more than eighty thousand years ago.

The Lava River Cave was part of the Newberry National Volcanic Monument. In addition to providing adrenaline junkies a subterranean adventure, it was also a living example of the region’s fiery past. The high desert of Central Oregon had a volatile history, making it one of the most popular tourist destinations for geology and outdoor lovers. From lava forests with standing casts of old growth trees to obsidian flows and calderas, the area provided a glimpse back in time and unique landscapes to explore.

I flipped the switch on my lantern, and a warm glow highlighted the cave’s striated walls. It looked as if I had stepped into another world. The rocks shimmered. Stalactites—or were they stalagmites—shot out of the ceiling and stretched along the walls. Ice clung to the ceiling and sparkled on the boulders. It was absolutely gorgeous. I paused and took in a long breath, inhaling the cold and the musty scent. Maybe this was worth it after all.

I unzipped my pack, pulled out my camera, and quickly clicked a round of shots of the ceiling above and the cave walls. My heart rate sped up as my camera lens focused on the tube in front of me. No wonder they called it a lava tube. I’d read about each section in my research, but seeing what lay ahead sent a shiver down my spine. A huge archway with fifty-foot ceilings stretched as far as my light would let me see. After that it was pure blackness. Oh no.

Panic welled in my throat. No way. There was no way I was doing this.

I started to back up, and I bumped into Dupree.

“Hey, wrong way.” He nudged me forward. The light from his headlamp hurt my eyes. Spots danced across my vision.

I held my hand to my forehead to shield my eyes. “Uh, shouldn’t we wait for everyone else?” I tried to think of other ways to stall. “Don’t you want to go first?”

His voice echoed slightly as he responded. I could hear water dripping from above and the sound of the rest of our group clambering down the stairs. “Nah, go ahead. It’s going to take a few minutes to get everyone down. Straight ahead. You can’t get lost. The cave only goes one way. You can wait for us in the Echo Chamber.”

My lips betrayed me. I felt them moving and faintly heard the word “Okay” escape from my mouth. I stumbled forward in a daze of fear. In addition to being afraid of small, tight spaces, I have a tendency to act as if I love the thrill of the adventure as much as the real athletes I’m tasked to cover for Northwest Extreme. I don’t. I would have gladly traded my hiking boots, pack, and lantern for an iced mocha by the side of the pool. Just because I wrote for an outdoor magazine didn’t mean I actually had to enjoy the outdoors, did it? I mean, wasn’t the sign of a great reporter to be able to write about something without having experienced it?

As much as I wanted to wait for the rest of our group to descend and then use the opportunity to sneak back up to daylight, I didn’t want anyone to think I was weak or want word to get back to Greg, my boss and dreamy editor, at Northwest Extreme. He was already in talks to sell the magazine. The last thing I needed was for someone to tell him that I couldn’t get the job done.

You’ve got this, Meg, I told myself as I took a timid step deeper into the cave.

My knees quaked as I continued on. I tried to focus on the cave’s beauty. Gam, my grandmother who works as a spiritual healer, would have said, “Margaret, set your intention. Instead of choosing to focus on fear, shift your perspective and focus on the beauty.

It was good advice. However, I couldn’t help but wonder what would happen if an earthquake struck. There was evidence all around me of cave-ins. Boulders littered the sides of the tube in huge piles at least three times my size. Cracks and fissures branched in every direction on the ceiling. What would it take for one of the overhangs to break loose and come crashing down on me? Or what about animals? I’d read that there had been a cougar sighting at the entrance a few years ago. What if I came face-to-face with a cougar or Oregon black bear?

Stop it, Meg.

I took a long breath of frosty air in through my nose and tried to concentrate on Gam’s advice. Keeping my eyes focused on the intricately carved walls, I could almost smell the hot magma and steam. I imagined bubbling red lava erupting out of the cone-shaped volcano and snaking its way through the cedar forest. Trees and wildlife would be annihilated in its path. White streaks cut through the dark walls where water had seeped in from above. I wondered how many years a trickle of groundwater had been finding its way deep below the earth’s surface.

Did generations before me traverse these same dark corridors? Was the cave a sacred space, or simply a shelter from summer’s blazing heat in the high Oregon desert?

I was only a few feet away from where the cave closed in tighter. This is it, Meg, I told myself. You’ve got this.

As I started to crouch down I noticed something bulky blocking the tunnel. A wave of dizziness washed over me. In my preliminary research I’d read about cave-ins. They didn’t happen frequently. But once was all it took, and Kira had warned us repeatedly not to touch the ceiling. “These ancient rocks can cave in at the slightest touch.”

I bent closer to get a better look at the rocks. To my horror I realized that those weren’t rocks blocking the tunnel. It was a body.

It all started a week ago when I got a text from Matt:


Matt was my longtime friend, and maybe more. We had been flirting for a while now and had even kissed a few times, but it wasn’t as if we were Facebook official or anything. Maybe it was me. I hadn’t wanted to take our friendship to the next level because I was worried about what would happen if things didn’t work out. I didn’t want to lose Matt as a friend. He had stuck with me through some tough times, like losing Pops—my dad—and struggling to find a job in Portland’s insanely competitive market. Things had shifted between us lately, and now I was starting to worry that if I didn’t take a chance on Matt I might lose him all together.

He was considering taking a job with Blazen, a new green energy startup in Bend, Oregon, that manufactured solar panels and LED lighting among other state-of-the-art technology. Their slogan was Blazen into the future, and they had been giving Matt the hard sell for weeks. They needed a technical writer for all of their internal and external publications, and Matt was a perfect candidate for the position. Not only did he have the writing chops from his time at the O, Oregon’s largest Pulitzer Prize–winning newspaper, but he lived and breathed technology. I’d never seen Matt without his phone or iPad. His devices were like extra appendages.

A year ago I would have said that Matt would never consider leaving the tech beat, but he had become frustrated with the O’s new requirements for their reporters. The newspaper business wasn’t what it used to be. Since Matt had been working the tech beat for the O, things had changed drastically. In an effort to stay afloat the newspaper had cut staff in half, outsourced printing, and reduced deliveries to only two weekdays and Sundays. The paper was as thin as a stick of Matt’s gum these days. Losing colleagues and friends had been rough on Matt, but to make matters worse his editor was pushing him to write clickbait headlines. Reporters’ salaries were based on how many clicks their online features received. Instead of writing in-depth pieces on the science behind the latest tech gadgets, Matt was forced to craft sensational headlines specifically designed to draw readers in. He hated it.

“Megs,” he told me over pints of his homebrew last week, “you won’t believe what my editor wants me to do.”

“What?”

“I just finished a piece on drones and how the National Weather Service is using them to fly into tornadoes. The research is incredible and groundbreaking. Scientists have never been able to fly into storm cells that strong, but with drones there’s no risk to human life, so they’re able to collect vast new amounts of data.”

“That sounds cool,” I told him as I sipped his frothy homebrew.

“Right. It’s an awesome story, but my editor won’t run it with the headline I wrote.”

“Why?”

“My working headline for the feature was, ‘The Eye of the Storm—Drone Technology Takes Flight.’”

“That sounds good.”

“I thought so, but he said it’s not sexy enough.”

“Are drones sexy?” I laughed.

Matt shrugged and sighed. “I don’t know, but my headlines have to be. My editor wants to see as many click-throughs as possible. He wants me to title it something like, ‘New Drone Technology Will Shock You.’”

“Maybe it will if it gets hit by lightning while it’s flying through the tornado,” I joked.

He chuckled, but I could tell that he was bothered by the trend in headlines and media. Matt was a rare breed. Ethics mattered to him. It was one of the many things that I appreciated about him, and one of the many reasons that my stomach always felt slightly fluttery whenever he was around. That and his earnest blue eyes. I didn’t want him to be miserable working at the O, or to have to compromise his principles, but I didn’t want him to move to Bend either.

Everything was changing. Jill Pettygrove, my bestie, had been offered a full scholarship to a prestigious art school in Italy. Matt was considering a move to Bend, and I was most likely soon to be out of a job. This wasn’t how I pictured my early twenties shaking out. I thought that the three of us would be working at our dream jobs and meeting for pints at one of Portland’s many pubs each night. By now I thought we might be buying our first houses or planning trips to Europe together, but it looked like we were headed in opposite directions.

I was excited for Jill and I wanted Matt to be happy, but the thought of losing them both was almost more than I could bear.

When Matt had sent me the text inviting me to Bend, it was what Gam would call a synchronistic opportunity. His text came right as I was due at our weekly pitch meeting at Northwest Extreme. I’d been so distracted by my personal life that I hadn’t come up with a story idea. I texted Matt,


He responded immediately with a long list of links about an expedition to the Lava River Caves. The caving tour was a joint project with the U.S. Forest Service and the High Desert Research Center. I read through the links that Matt had sent and felt a wave of excitement pulse through me. The Forest Service and High Desert Research Center were partnering to allow unprecedented access to the lava tunnel in response to new legislation proposed by Congressman Riley from Eastern Oregon. The congressman’s bill would loosen federal restrictions on Forest Service land. I printed out copies of the bill and quickly learned that there was already a battle brewing between Congressman Riley and his constituents against the Forest Service. He and a group of his supporters would be touring the cave as part of publicity tour to garner support for the bill.

This was exactly the story I had been looking for. It had all the makings for a substantial piece—controversy and a subterranean trek. Not to mention that if Greg agreed to send me to Bend, it would also mean a few days away with Matt.

I spent some time gathering as much research as I could on the caving tour, and by the time of our weekly pitch meeting I was armed with a stack of data about the lava tube and a list of reasons why I was the best person to cover the story.

After an unbearably hot summer, September had ushered in cool, breezy mornings, a refreshing welcome from the unrelenting heat. I tucked my research notes into my pink canvas tote, grabbed a pale pink cardigan sweater, and headed for my car. I knew that by later in the day I would lose the sweater, but the misty air held the promise of fall. Portland is nothing short of spectacular in the fall, with crisp mornings and lingering late-evening sun, perfect for grabbing a pint after work or, as most of my colleagues prefer, sneaking out early for a hike in Forest Park.

The tree-lined streets in my North Portland (affectionately called NoPo by locals) neighborhood were beginning to turn. The tips of old oak leaves faded into golden yellows, and red twinges glinted in the sunlight. Soon organic farm stands would pop up on street corners, where artisans would sell homemade apple and pear butter and carved festive gourds. The breweries would release their fall lines featuring pumpkin ales and hoppy Oktoberfest brews. I couldn’t wait to see tents line the Willamette River and hear the sound of bands jamming on the waterfront. Only this year I won’t have my two best friends to celebrate with, I thought with a sigh.

I never anticipated that we’d be splitting up this soon. Maybe I was naïve, but I had always imagined that Jill, Matt, and I would stay in Portland for a while. The city wasn’t the same as it had been in my youth. Over the last decade Portland had seen an influx of millennials who came west to follow their dreams. I understood the lure of the young city. Portland had become a mecca for twenty-somethings with a deep wanderlust. The city offered hipster culture, a pioneering spirit, and abundant opportunities for adventure. With so many new residents, Portland was experiencing serious growing pains. Housing was outrageous. City officials had declared a housing crisis as rents soared and buyers offered thousands of dollars over the asking price for tiny bungalows. Urban neighborhoods had become gentrified, pushing out longtime residents and at-risk families. Homelessness had reached an all-time high. Tent cities sprouted up throughout the city, causing alarm to tourists and neighborhood associations.

As much as I loved the city, I wondered if there was a place for me here now. Before I had time to dwell more on my future, I arrived at Northwest Extreme’s headquarters. The vintage brick warehouse sat next to the Willamette River. A paved path ran the length of the waterfront. This morning runners in brightly colored spandex lined the pathway. The Portland Marathon was just a few weeks away, and there was rarely a moment when the popular running trail wasn’t packed with people training for the event.

I paused for a moment and took in the sight of the golden brown leaves rustling in the wind and the choppy river below. This might be going away too if Greg decided to sell the magazine—which was looking more and more likely. Greg had dropped a bombshell at our last staff meeting. He had been at the helm of Northwest Extreme for ten years and had made the magazine the outdoor publication in the United States and overseas. Our readership had grown by tens of thousands, but Greg told us he was considering selling. A Japanese investment firm, Hoshino, was interested in purchasing the magazine, and he was thinking over their offer.

Greg had insisted that the Hoshino team wanted to keep the magazine intact. “I don’t foresee major layoffs,” he had said, trying to calm everyone’s nerves. “You’re going to love these guys. They are completely enamored with the Pacific Northwest. Don’t sweat it.”

Of course everyone was sweating it. Three of my colleagues had already started interviewing with other publications. I probably should have started plastering my résumé around town, but I wanted to wait it out and see if Greg really did sell and whether the Japanese team would consider keeping me on. I’d come to love my job at Northwest Extreme. If you had asked me a year ago if I would be saying that, I’m sure the answer would have been no. But things had changed. I wasn’t a novice anymore and, surprisingly, I enjoyed writing about the outdoors and extreme sports.

Sure, maybe I wasn’t the most athletic or adventurous staff member, but being out in wild, untouched corners of the Northwest had given me a new appreciation for the land and a new ability to connect and go within. I didn’t want to give that up. So much so that I was willing to do just about anything to keep my job—even if that meant testing my fear of enclosed spaces.

I dropped my bag off at my desk and headed for the conference room, which had a wall of windows looking out to the waterfront path. Greg stood at the helm of the large rectangular table. He reminded me of Indiana Jones, only more chiseled and polished. I caught him glance at my sparkly pink top and layered, pastel tulle skirt. He greeted me with a friendly wave. A slight smile spread to his cheeks. Let’s just say that I don’t exactly always look the part of an adventure journalist. I prefer vintage fashion and all things pink. My coworkers constantly tease me about my work attire, but I’ve learned to banter back. I mean, come on, how fashion forward are hiking boots and mud marathon T-shirts?

Figuring out where I stood with Greg had been a challenge, not just because of his rugged good looks but because I had recently learned that he and Pops had worked together at the O. Matt found a picture. . .