Mara returned to the canyon overlook, the evidence files spread out on the dashboard of her truck. The story was written in the margins of the tragedy. Elias had caught Harlan in the act of robbing the tomb. He had tried to stop him. During the confrontation, or perhaps because of Harlan’s reckless hammering, the unstable ceiling gave way. Harlan, closer to the exit, scrambled out into the outer chamber, snatching Elias’s notebook and tearing out the page that identified him before fleeing into the desert. He left Elias behind a wall of tons of fallen limestone.
Elias hadn’t died instantly. Trapped in total darkness without his pack, his flashlight, or his notebook, he had crawled into the deepest recess of the cave, hoping to find a ventilation draft. A secondary collapse must have sealed him deeper into the mountain, where his remains were safely beyond the reach of modern machinery—forever a part of the canyon he died protecting.
But before the darkness took him, he had his wedding ring, a metal buckle, and a sliver of light. Mara went back down to the chamber one last time to read the final line on the wall under high-powered forensic lighting. Below the initials E.G., the faint, scratched words finally became legible: Anna, I tried to come home.