“It was the chef’s wife’s name,” the male honeymooner said, the first word he’d spoken to anyone but his wife.

“No,” Doreen said.

“I know,” I said.

Doreen looked at me. “You think you do?”

“LaBinnah is Hannibal spelled backwards.”

Doreen clapped. “You’re the first person in twelve years who’s gotten that right,” she said. “Twelve years.”

When we’d returned to the office and disembarked from the van, Doreen asked me what I’d thought of the tour. “It was life changing,” I said.

She beamed at my report. “I’m so pleased. Thank you for coming. And come back soon.”

“Good night,” I said, then turned and walked back to my hotel.

I meant what I said to Doreen, just not for the reasons she had likely assumed. The experience had had a profound impact on me. Not the paranormal aspect of the tour—which I had found mildly amusing—but rather my experience with Mr. Lewis. In this man I had seen something far more frightening than any graveyard specter or poltergeist. I had seen the bitterness of unaccepted loss. I had seen the possibility of my own future and my own ruin.

Chapter Twenty-five

C H A P T E R

Twenty-five

What’s wrong with me? Something’s broken.

Alan Christoffersen’s diary

A man’s experiences of life are a book. There was never yet an uninteresting life. Such a thing is an impossibility. Inside of the dullest exterior there is a drama, a comedy, and a tragedy.

—Mark Twain

I hated to leave Hannibal. On the way out of town, I stopped at Mark Twain’s Cave, the same cave Twain explored as a boy and referenced in five of his books—most famously in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, where Tom and Becky get mixed up with Injun Joe.

I left my pack behind the counter at the cave’s gift shop, then entered the cave with a tall, boyish-looking guide and a small group from a Church of God Bible class visiting from Memphis, Tennessee.

Mark Twain’s cave was a remarkable thing—a labyrinth of shelved limestone that tangled and twisted in the belly of the hill for more than six miles.

“One could get more lost in here than on the New Jersey Turnpike,” our guide announced. How he had come up with that exact comparison I wasn’t sure. I decided that he’d probably been lost in New Jersey at some time.

For the next hour we wound our way through a few dozen of the cave’s more than 260 passages. Inside, the cave was chilly, as it maintained a year-round temperature of 52 degrees, and many in our group complained that they hadn’t brought their sweaters.

Among the many things we saw was the signature of Jesse James, who hid out in the cave after the robbery of a train in a nearby town.