The sense of urgency plaguing him these past few days filled every muscle in his body, growing stronger the further he walked across town. Tonight’s discussion—or confrontation, depending on how one looked at it—was its fuel. Dinneck and the girl might not be there when he arrived. They might have stayed at the church and called the cops. What he’d said tonight certainly convinced Elizabeth he was a little under-stocked in the sanity department.
Vincent felt, with all his heart, that he’d connected with the young minister. Nathan Dinneck believed him, or at least hadn’t completely ruled him out.
There was nothing to do but continue forward and trust that God would keep Nathan on the right path. Vincent kept mostly to the darker, residential roads, moving at a forced leisurely pace in the more populated corners of Hillcrest. It was the second time in less than a week he had traveled this route. Cutting through the woods at the end of the main cemetery was always difficult, and he wondered how the teenagers managed it so often during the summer without breaking their necks. His jeans were caked with mud up to the knees, the result of stepping in a soft section of the wetlands. Now as he walked along Hepworth Avenue, his sneakers squished with trapped water. He reached back and adjusted the steel bar under his jacket.
Hepworth intersected with the far end of Greenwood Street. Almost there. Headlights behind him. He looked in panic for a place to step off the road. Nowhere, not without looking suspicious. He continued on, hands in his pants pockets, keeping a steady pace. The pistol suddenly weighed a hundred pounds. He hoped the approaching car wasn’t a police cruiser. Nothing like coming across a guy with a pony tail wandering through Smalltown, USA, carrying both a gun and a crowbar.
A minivan passed by. He made a point not to look into its windows. The van continued to the far curve in the road before pulling into a driveway. Its headlights cut out. Vincent slowed his pace, not wanting to catch up too quickly. As it was, he moved past the house just as the driver, a teenager obviously having borrowed his parents’ van for the night, was walking up the front steps. He looked over as Vincent passed. Vincent waved absently and the kid waved back, obviously assuming he was a neighbor taking a late stroll. The boy went inside.
Vincent let his breath out in a slow, cleansing sigh. He was nervous, edgy. He wished he could go back to the house and write in his notebook. Noting the events of his life gave him control over them. Or, at least, the illusion of control.
He reached the intersection with Greenwood. It was a long road, mostly wooded, with the old cemetery at the far end. As he turned onto it, something troubled him. When he brought Dinneck and the girl down into the crypt, what would they see? The vault held more than one secret. An amazing, terrifying thing. When Ruth first showed him, he was shocked. Dazzled wouldn’t be far from a qualifying adjective. The Ark had been smaller than he’d anticipated, barely a yard long, two feet high and deep, but that fact didn’t seem to matter. Not at first. It should have. There was so much power filling the small room. She made him look a second time, bringing him closer to what he’d assumed was the source of such pulsing energy. He saw something very different, as if a veil had been lifted inside his head.
At that moment, twenty-seven years ago, a much younger Vinnie Tarretti wondered aloud how in the world he’d seen what he’d seen the first time. Ruth had smiled, weakly, and whispered that nothing in the world had anything to do with it. More than anything else, that moment standing before the makeshift altar under the earth had convinced him. Of everything. This, more than anything, would be his ace when convincing Dinneck. It had to be.
Twenty-one paces past the last house on his right, he turned off the road and made his slow way through the mountain laurel and sumac, deeper into the woods. It didn’t take long before he stepped into a clearing dotted with the muted outlines of dozens of gravestones at the far northern edge of the graveyard.
He was blinded by the glare of a flashlight.
“Who’s there?” whispered Dinneck’s voice.
Vincent raised his hand to his face and whispered back, “Could you please try your best not to blind me, Reverend?”
The light cut out. The dark cemetery was replaced by a white sheet.
Dinneck and Elizabeth had been hiding behind a statue of the Virgin Mary near the exact point of Vincent’s arrival. They probably heard him coming as soon as he’d stepped off the road.
He blinked and waited for the night blindness to resolve itself. Two shapes walked up to him.
“Sorry,” Nathan said.
“It’s all right.” He reached behind him and carefully pulled out the crowbar. The woman gasped. He said, “Oh, relax,” and waved it in the air like a baton. “We need this to get inside.” He pointed toward the grave across the way, then handed the bar to Nathan. “Let’s get to work.”
* * *
In that brief, second flash of light across the clearing, Peter saw Vincent Tarretti. Soon after, their voices reached across the distance to him. Paulson, he thought, you are such an ass. He needed him here now, but did not dare turn on his phone. Not yet. Aside from the LED’s glow, the subtle beeps of the number pad as he dialed might as well be fireworks. He needed to wait, at least until the trio were out of sight.
From the way things were progressing so far, he knew that meant when they’d lowered themselves into the grave. Even if they wisely left one of their number at ground level as lookout, he would have to make the call. There would be precious little time left. While he waited, he busied himself wiping the gun he’d used to kill Pastor Hayden. He used a new handkerchief, working at every corner. If everything panned out, this would be the last time he held the weapon.
* * *
“I’m glad you thought to bring a flashlight,” Vincent mumbled. “I can’t believe I forgot something so basic.”
Elizabeth kept the light aimed at Tarretti’s feet. She didn’t trust much of anything he said, but Nate had chosen to trust him so she didn’t have much choice.
“After you,” she said, waggling the beam quickly across the ground. He took the lead, followed by Elizabeth, who tried to keep the light fixed at a spot just ahead of him. Vincent’s shadow loomed over the angels’ bent forms. Nate was being his usual quiet, introspective self. She wondered—not without a little hope—if he was suffering from second thoughts now that the moment of truth had arrived.
The caretaker wasted no time. He knelt down, occasionally directing her to point the light this way or that. He pushed aside the leaves and dirt like someone looking for a lost marble. An appropriate image, Elizabeth decided.
Tarretti worked his fingers along the concrete base, at first only pushing aside a thin layer of dirt, but shifting more and more as he worked his way to the edge of the platform. Here the dirt and sediment was at least three inches thick. Once he found what he sought, he carefully ran his fingertips back along the narrow groove he’d made, then stopped.
“Here it is,” he said. Nate moved beside Elizabeth, gave her one quick glance, then continued to stare. All their attention was on the kneeling man as he slowly uncovered more and more of what was apparently the edge between the concrete base and a door of some sort.
“Keep the light here. Good.” He straightened, then raised his hand to Nate, who handed over the crowbar. Tarretti worked one edge into the exposed rift between the two concrete sections, rocking the tool back and forth. Something shifted.
Vincent looked up and offered a tired smile. “Well, here goes nothing.”
He pulled back on the crowbar, exerting a slow but increasingly intense pressure. The silence of the night was invaded by a subtle hiss, like someone slowly opening a bottle of Coke. The sound grew in intensity, a ssssssssssssssssssss followed by what Elizabeth could only describe as a sigh. Air raced into the void under the concrete slab. Tarretti used the sudden release of pressure to lever the cover up and over an inch, enough so that it did not fall back into place. Once done, he relaxed, and the concrete slab settled back at a new, awkward angle.
>
The smell was of old dust, of clothes in her grandmother’s attic. Images of discovering a long-neglected trunk one weekend while her parents cleaned out Gram’s house after her funeral. Elizabeth was young, five or six years old, but the memory of the trunk being opened and the smell of decayed fabric and stale air came back to her now. As did the image of herself as a child, lifting one thin, long white dress from the trunk. Then the stale odor passed up from the breach in the grave and was gone, merging with newer, fresher air. With it went the unexpected memory of the attic.
It occurred to her only then that in the hole they’d just reopened was not a pile of forgotten dresses and shawls, but a body. A decomposed, perhaps mummified corpse of John Solomon, preserved by the airless vacuum inside.
It was time to go home. No question.
“Seen enough?” she whispered. “Can we leave now?”
Nate seemed to consider the suggestion, then slowly shook his head. At least he appeared to, in the afterglow of the light still trained on Tarretti’s hands. The latter was looking up with a worried expression. He’d apparently heard the question.
“Let’s get this over with,” Nate said at last, and Vincent nodded in undisguised relief. Using the crowbar, he wiggled it up and down slowly along the edge, until the slab was far enough off the base that he could move it with his own hands. He slowly dragged it clear of the entrance.
The three of them stood and looked down into the square black hole at their feet. The hole stared back like an unblinking eye.
Trying to keep out of Elizabeth’s flashlight beam, Nate walked up and stood beside Tarretti. The light bounced as Elizabeth joined him. She was like a guard dog, not letting him get more than a pace away.
She shined the light into the hole. The three of them peered in. A wooden ladder reached from the dust-covered floor to the lip of the entrance.
“I’ll go in first,” Vincent said. “This ladder is built into the side, see? Last time I was here it held my weight, but that was a long time ago. If it can still support me, you can follow.”
Without waiting for a reply, he sat on the lip of the concrete and carefully stepped onto the top rung. It creaked, but held. Using his hands to support himself on the edge, he stepped down two more rungs, far enough to grip the ladder. In the flashlight beam his fingertips were black from digging. This time, the ladder’s protests were more a moan under the weight. Before his head dropped below ground level, he took one last, deep breath of the night air. Then he was down, standing with a slight hunch on the floor.
“Not a very high ceiling in here; watch your head.”
Nate sat on the edge and mirrored Tarretti’s descent. It was Elizabeth’s turn, now. Using only one hand for support, she kept the flashlight trained always on some part of their host. Her first sensation as she moved lower was how much colder the air felt inside. When she stepped off the ladder, the floor of the room was, indeed, covered in dust an inch thick. From the way the chamber’s seal had hissed, she didn’t imagine much had fallen recently. Perhaps over the years, enough dirt and grime had settled into the cracks to effectively seal off any remaining source of outside air.
She took a tentative breath. Not as bad as she’d imagined, but then, it was the same air that had been outside a moment before. It tasted... older, though. Probably the dust kicked up by her feet, enough to remind her where they were. Elizabeth saw nothing in front of her, and kept Tarretti in her peripheral vision.
Then she felt it, like an electrical thrill in the air moments before a thunderstorm. Her imagination again, fueled by the cooler air.
Vincent whispered, “It’s over here.” He took a step forward into the darkness. Only then did Elizabeth shine the light in that direction.
Nathan grabbed Elizabeth’s arm. She didn’t react, but stared ahead and with a harsh whisper, said, “It can’t be true. It is not true....”
Chapter Fifty-One
Manny Paulson was constantly amazed by how bright the world truly was at night, once his eyes adjusted. He’d had plenty of practice lately. Every night for the past four days, Quinn had him sitting here in the cover of the graveyard’s utility road, with no purpose but keeping an eye on the house of the weirdo who ran the cemetery. Manny had worked night shifts in a couple of different jobs. Those hadn’t been very long-lasting, through no fault of his own. If the goombahs running the bottling plant couldn’t keep their money from going out the door, it wasn’t his fault.
The last job he’d had, doing data entry at a small mail-order shop, was even worse than his assembly line gigs. He’d been forced to hunker over a lone personal computer all night, entering names and addresses into a mail order program. The printing on the data entry sheets got smaller and smaller the longer the night stretched on. Heaven help him if the witch who ran the place came in to find he hadn’t met his quota of contacts. On that job, the challenge had been keeping awake, without drinking so much coffee that he spent most of his shift in the bathroom. More than once he tried to convince Boss Lady that converting from mail order to a cheaper spamming venture on the web would be the way to go. She’d insisted on staying in the dark ages. The company closed down six months after he’d been laid off. Well, he assumed that’s what happened. He never bothered to check.
Manny couldn’t remember holding down a job much longer than a year. Not that he wasn’t qualified, with an associate degree in business and a couple of older references that he still managed to squeeze onto one more application. But the time had come when his luck ran out, along with the country’s economy. He’d been living day to day as it was, but soon it felt more like dying day to day. The zombies at the unemployment office kept limiting his benefits because of sporadic work history. His options had been quickly drying up.
At least the letters demanding child support for his son and daughter, usually from someone claiming to be an attorney (though he was certain it was just some guy Melissa worked with pretending to be someone important), had trickled to an occasional note venting his ex-wife’s disgust for his lack of concern for “your children.” She was an accountant and made plenty of money. Manny once considered finding a lawyer himself and suing Melissa for alimony. But lawyers cost money, didn’t they? And money was tight.
As for his kids, fatherhood was never big on his list of goals. It was fun while it lasted, but now that he was free, Melissa could keep the headaches. Maybe if grandchildren came into the picture a decade or two from now, he might show his face again. He heard it was a lot less work with grandchildren.
Enter Peter Quinn, during one of Manny’s rare purchases of beer at The Greedy Grocer. He never had been much of a drinker, preferring to avoid any habit that might suck more coins from the bare cupboard his bank account had become. Still, now and then he’d splurge on a twelve pack of Bud and rent a couple of movies.
His first assumption when Quinn caught up with him outside the store was that the guy was homosexual and hitting on him. Manny had excused himself and headed for his car, but Quinn followed. He asked if Manny needed a job. Steady work, not very difficult, and the pay was good.
Sounded too good to be true. But Quinn hadn’t been lying. The work was easy, and the pay was twice anything he’d ever collected before. Everything was under the table, to boot. Nothing for Uncle Sam, or Melissa, to lay claim to. All Manny had to do was not smirk when Quinn started chanting to the devil or talking about some kind of valuable prizes buried in town. The guy was seriously nuts, no question about that. But he must be rich, connected with the mob or something, since the cash every week was real. The money had to come from somewhere. Quinn was always calling someone in Chicago. He was more likely connected with the mafia than a three thousand year old cult. Quinn and his goons were on some modern day treasure hunt, no more, no less.
Didn’t matter to him. As long as they kept paying and he didn’t wake up some day with a horse’s head in his bed, he was more than happy to sit in the woods and stare monotonously at some dark house all night. The vi
gil wouldn’t be half as hard, though, if he could read something. The boss had been very specific about no lights, and Quinn had an uncanny way of knowing when he was being lied to. So, Manny simply sat in his car, now and then pouring more coffee from his thermos when he felt his eyes closing for too long. Like they were beginning to do now.
His phone vibrated against his hip. Thank God, he thought. A distraction.
He pulled the cell from its holster. “Manny Paulson.”
Quinn’s voice was barely audible, so quietly was he whispering. “Where are you, Paulson?”
“The usual spot. Nothing to report.”
A pause, then, “Obviously. However, Tarretti, Reverend Dinneck and his girlfriend are here at the cemetery on Greenwood Street, you blind, useless....” He stopped, let his breath out slowly before continuing. “Get over here, now, but be quiet about it. Do you remember where the grave is?”
“Pretty sure, yeah. And listen, I swear I didn’t see—”
But the call had already been disconnected. Manny cursed and started the car.
* * *
Peter pocketed the phone, then lifted the gun in the handkerchief. It was a clip-fed nine millimeter, the same type carried by Vincent Tarretti, though Peter didn’t know this fact. The rounds were small but effective.
“Mister Everson.”
Josh looked at him. “Yes?”
Making sure the safety was thumbed to the “on” position, at least until he could see how the kid handled it, he handed him the weapon. He would be sure the safety was off before he sent the boy into the grave. “Take this and follow me. I have something I need you to do. Very important, and you will want to do this very much.” He rose; the young man did likewise. Peter picked up the battery-powered lantern they had brought with them from the car, but left it dark.
Solomon's Grave Page 21