Crazy Mountain Kiss by Keith McCafferty Page B

really. Last time I climbed down into one of these things the situation went south, if you recall.” He was remembering a cabin in the Cabinet Mountains, where he’d been shot at while cowering in the cellar.
    Ettinger’s grunt was unsympathetic. She handed Stranahan her flashlight. “I’ll notify next of kin.”
    The table was positioned over the cellar entrance and Sean had topull it aside to lift the iron rung recessed into the door. He pulled the door up and over, the hinges groaning. The cellar was little more than a crawl space, about the size of two stacked coffins. The earth had a smell like leaf rot, but compared to the odor above the floorboards, it wasn’t unpleasant. Sean noted scattered pieces of two-by-four, not much else except a chipped shovel with half a handle. That wasn’t surprising, given that the cellar had doubtlessly been ransacked by every teenager who skied in with a rental party. A trapdoor exerts a magnetic pull akin to the attic door in a horror movie. The skin crawls when you open it, but you open it.
    Stranahan smiled at the way his mind tended to wander, and then his brow furrowed. He was looking at an anthill of dirt a half tone lighter than the rest of the floor. He shone his light on it, then raised the light up the nearest wall. At about waist height, there was a discoloration in the packed earth. The soil here was loose and he dug with his fingers. Only a few inches behind the wall his fingernails scraped against metal. He picked up the shovel. In less than a minute he had unearthed a rectangular metal box the size of a brick. He thumbed the soil away from the lid. It was a shortbread cookie tin with the image of a Swiss miss on the lid, wearing a scoop-neck frock that strained to contain her charms. She was holding a plate of cookies. He carried the tin up the steps and replaced the trapdoor.
    â€œBuried treasure,” he announced, placing the tin on the table.
    Martha grunted. “Gimme. No, don’t touch it again. Let me put on my rubbers.” She donned a pair of latex gloves to examine the box. “This reminds me of the fruitcake tin my mother would bring out every Christmas. We’d put sugar cookies in it.” She pried the lid off with her fingernails. Inside was an unopened pack of playing cards with pictures of old fishing lures on the backs. She extracted a paperback book with a blonde on the cover.
A Purple Place for Dying,
by John D. MacDonald. She fished out the last item in the box, a miniature troll doll with green hair.
    She bit her lip. “I think this is a geocache. I’ve never seen one before, but I think that’s what this is. Do you know how they work?”
    Stranahan nodded. “Last fall I found one in an abandoned boxcar up on the Big Hole. You sign up online to access a databank that lists a bunch of coordinates. Then you pick one in the area where you’re headed and find your way with a GPS. There’s an online logbook you sign when you get back home.”
    â€œUh-huh. And these are what, gifts?”
    â€œThe etiquette is, if you take something, you leave something else in its place.”
    Ettinger fingered the troll doll. “There’s something in it,” she said. She shook it. “Hear that?”
    â€œPop its head off,” Stranahan said.
    The ticking sound had been made by a wafer of black plastic the size of a postage stamp. It was a four-gigabyte memory card for a digital camera, sealed in a plastic snap case.
    â€œYou wanted to know why I brought you along, Stranny? It’s ’cause of stuff like this.” Ettinger pointed an accusatory finger. “This is what I mean when I tell people you manage to step into shit even if there’s only one horse in the pasture.”
    She got her laptop from the Cherokee. The card held one file, a high-definition video that opened with a wide-angle view of a narrow bed. The date of recording showed in white letters in