by Yocum, Robin
“Once we get this off, then what?”
He looked at me. “We’ve got to go down and see what’s in there.”
Chills raced up my spine. He didn’t mean “we.” I knew what he was thinking. “You want me to go down there?” I said. “Down there—God only knows how far—and see if your mom’s body is buried in the bottom of this cistern? That’s your plan?”
Travis nodded. “Look, Mitch, I know you don’t want to do it, but if my mom is buried down there, I don’t want to be the one who finds her.”
“I understand,” I said.
“Good. Besides, you owe me.”
“I owe you! How do you figure?”
“You stayed in the bathroom that night while Big Frank kicked my ass.”
“That’s not fair.”
“Nothing is fair; nothing is free,” he said, staring at the cap. “How deep do you figure it is?”
“Too damn deep for a ladder.”
“I’ll figure it out,” he grinned. “Come by about ten.”
Travis was sitting on the front porch steps waiting for me. He motioned me around the side of the house where he had a six-foot length of heavy pipe, a pair of two-by-eight planks, a car battery, and the winch and a length of a cable that were remnants of Big Frank’s unsuccessful attempt to open a tow truck business. A flashlight was stuck in his hip pocket. I looked at the pile of materials and asked, “Can I assume that you’ve developed a plan?”
“You can.”
“Can I also assume that I won’t like it?”
“Oh, most assuredly. In fact, you’re going to hate it.”
We placed the pipe, winch, and battery on the planks and carried them like a stretcher. From the alley behind Travis’s house we cut across the back of the lumberyard to Thorneapple Creek and walked along its soggy bank a quarter mile up the hill to the rear of Shaft Row and the foundation of the old Baron home. By the time we were able to drop the load, my arms and shoulders ached from slogging along the creek bank. Causing me more angst, however, was the fact that I believed I had figured out Travis’s plan for placing me inside the cistern. And he was right. I didn’t like it. Not even a little bit.
Travis used the steel pipe to wedge the three-foot cement disk off the cistern opening. Once the cement cap was clear of the rock base, we were able to rotate it to its edge and balance it in the weeds. We then placed the two-by-eight planks over the opening with a two-inch gap between them. The winch was placed on the middle of the planks with the cable running between them. At the end of the cable was a loop, a foot in diameter, held together with cable crimps. Travis hooked the winch to the battery with wiring that he had carried over his shoulder, then tested the winch, both up and down.
Unfortunately for me, it worked like a charm.
“We’re ready,” he said, handing me the flashlight. “The batteries are fresh; I just put ’em in.”
I took the flashlight and shined it down the hole. The beam was faint. “I thought you said these batteries were fresh.”
“Fresh to that flashlight. They’ve been in the kitchen drawer for a while.”
I guessed that it was sixteen feet to the bottom of the cistern. I shined the light to the cistern floor. The beam was faint, but bright enough to see the cistern floor. There was no body, just the dark and dank earth. “I suppose you want me to dig around down there.”
“Yeah.” He took a deep breath and peered into the cistern. “Look, if I were you, I wouldn’t want to do this, either. But I have to know if there’s anything down there. There’s probably not, but I have to know for sure or it will always bug me. Once I know, I’ll be okay. We can put Project Amanda to rest and I swear that I’ll peacefully go on with the rest of my life. But I can’t have this gnawing at my gut forever, and I can’t go down there and poke around where my mother might be buried. I just don’t have the guts to do it. So I really need your help on this one. Do this for me, and I promise I won’t ask for any more favors.”
I looked him in the eyes and said, “Liar.”
He laughed. “But this will be the last big favor I ask.”
“Qualify ‘big,’” I said, putting my right foot in the cable loop. He lowered the cable until I could stand free of the edge of the hole. He tucked the shovel under my arm, then he slowly lowered me into the abyss. The winch whined as my head disappeared beneath the rim of the opening, I was overtaken by fear unrelated to the possibility of unearthing the skeletal remains of Amanda Baron. “Travis, that battery isn’t going to die when I’m at the bottom of the hole, is it?” I asked, my words echoing off the walls of the cistern.
“I’m hoping it doesn’t die when you’re halfway down.”
“Goddammit, Travis, that’s not funny.”
“It’s funny if you’re not the one being lowered into the hole.”
“Travis, if I . . .”
“It’s fine. Quit fussin’, grandma. And if something happens, I’ll run home and take the battery out of the Fifty-Seven.”
“Yeah, great. As I recall the last time you tried to take something out of Big Frank’s garage it wasn’t exactly a sterling success.”
“Try to remember who’s controlling the winch, would you, smart ass?”
The drop was slow, just a few feet a minute. Once I got comfortable with the trip down, I held the shovel below my feet so I could feel for the bottom. When the shovel hit, I reached down with my left foot for the earthy floor.
It was darker than anyplace I had ever been. I could see nothing. I was certain that as soon as I moved some dirt a boney hand was going to reach up and pull me into the grave, or I would turn on the light and shine it into the decaying face of a miraculously back-from-the-dead Amanda Baron. She would arise from her grave to avenge her death and mistakenly confuse me for Big Frank, and of course the battery would go dead and leave me stranded in a hole with the walking corpse as hunks of flesh fell from her body. I realized these were all unreasonable fears, but I was the king of unreasonable fears. And, at that moment, I was trapped in a black, sixteen-foot pit with my vivid imagination.
The cistern had a diameter of about four feet, which didn’t leave much room to maneuver. I turned on the flashlight and wedged it between two stones on the wall. I pressed my back against one wall, pinning the dangling cable behind me, and shoved the spade into the ground across from me. The dirt was soft and the spade easily sunk to its top edge. I pulled back on the handle until it hit the stone wall, then flicked the dirt to one side. I decided to scrape dirt away on one half of the cistern floor, then the other half. After taking a few scoops, I began using the spade like a hoe, raking the soft dirt away from the other side of the cistern.
“How’s it going?” Travis asked, his voice echoing through the hole.
“Helen Keller digs a ditch,” I said.
The dirt was building up around my feet, and I had hit nothing but the soft dirt bottom. I had skimmed a foot of dirt from the cistern floor when the shovel scraped against something hard. I froze for a moment, then gently used the shovel to remove more dirt from the area.
“What was that?” Travis asked.
“I don’t know.”
I pulled the flashlight out of the wall and slowly dropped the beam toward the floor, following the light down with my eyes. When the hazy yellow beam reached the floor, I took a breath and lowered my eyes, certain that a skull would be staring back at me. Across the floor was a grayish material, lumpy and solid. I kneeled and brushed the dirt from the concrete base of the cistern. I had hit nothing but the end of the line. Confident that a body could not be hidden beneath the dirt and the concrete bottom, I moved to the other side of the cistern and sank the spade into the undisturbed dirt. It took but a few tries to confirm that nothing but dirt and concrete lay at the bottom of the cistern. I was overcome by my own bravery and relief.
I put my foot in the loop and told Travis, “Bring ’er up.” I was at the surface and resting ten minutes later.
“Anything?” Travis asked.
“Nothing,” I responded.
“What was that scraping noise I heard?”
“Nothing. Just my shovel scraping the bottom of the cistern.”
“Rocks?”
“Concrete.”
“Concrete?”
“Yeah, the concrete floor.”
Travis didn’t have to say it, for I already realized my folly, but he did anyway. “Why would there be a concrete floor in a hundred-year-old cistern?” He pointed to the outcropping of limestone that extended over Thorneapple Creek. “Wouldn’t you just dig down to the limestone and use that as your foundation?”
“Maybe it was just the concrete left over from making the cap. They just poured it down the cistern.”
“Sure,” Travis said. “They poured the cap, then after it hardened they reopened it and dumped what was left down the cistern. Makes perfect sense to me.”
My jaw started to tighten. “Might I remind you that you’re lipping off to the only guy in the free world who would allow himself to be lowered into a cistern, at night, to look for a body?”
That brought a grin. “Was it just in a pile, or was it completely covering the bottom?”
“It was higher in the middle than around the sides, but it covers the entire bottom of the cistern.”
“Mitchell, we’ve got to see what’s under that concrete,” he said.
“Your use of the word ‘we’ continues to amaze me.”
“Can you break it up with a sledgehammer?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. I don’t know how thick it is, and I don’t have any room down there to swing it. I’ll have to use it like a tamp.”
“Okay. Wait here. I’ll run home and get a sledge.”
“And flashlight batteries. These are about done.”
Travis ran off through the brush to the creek bank. I could hear him for only a minute until his footfalls were drowned out by the sounds of the stacks clearing at the power plant south of town. He was back in twenty minutes, puffing for air. He handed me two new batteries, and I put them in the flashlight. The beam was bright against the wall of the cistern. “Much better.” I slipped the light back in my pocket and my right foot back in the cable loop. Travis lowered me a few feet, handed me the sledge, then sent me on my final descent. I was a little more comfortable with the drop and the darkness. I kicked the dirt from one side of the concrete, then straddled the area, allowing the head of the sledge hammer to dangle between my legs. I lifted my hands to eye height, then slammed the sledge straight down. The head hit crooked and the handle jerked out of my hands. I stumbled forward and smacked my knuckles against the rock wall, scraping them clear of skin. “Yowl!”
“You okay?” Travis echoed.
I shined the flashlight on them. Skinned, but not a lot of blood. “I’ll be fine.”
The concrete was several inches thick at the center of the cistern. The second hit struck closer to the wall. It sounded hollow and seemed to give a little. I hit it several more times, each strike a little harder than the one before. On the sixth hit, the cement cracked. I set the sledge to the side and lit the area with the flashlight.
“What’d you find?” Travis asked.
“Nothing.”
The light was still strong, and it easily lit up the bottom of the cistern. There were two cracks in the concrete, creating a rough, pie-shaped wedge. I moved a few small chunks of concrete that had broken loose at the point and wedged an index finger under the concrete and lifted, carefully standing it against the wall and turning my light on the floor.
I would have expected to have panicked, but it wasn’t scary, actually. In fact, there was something oddly serene about the tiny bones lying in the black earth beneath the yellow beam of my light. It was a browned wrist bone and the delicate bones of a pinky, ring finger, and middle finger, resting in the dirt lengthwise along the top of the opening. I stared at the skeletal remains for several minutes, hunching over it to block Travis’s view. How would I tell him? In his heart, he had wanted desperately to believe his dad had not been involved. He still held faint hope that she was alive. Now, there was no doubt as to her fate. For a minute, I pondered sliding the concrete wedge back into place and telling him I had found nothing. “Goddammit, Travis. Why didn’t you just leave well enough alone?” I muttered.
“What’d you say?” he asked.
“Talking to myself,” I said.
He had found his grandparents. He could have just walked away. I took hold of the concrete wedge and was ready to recover the grave when the beam of my flashlight caught the glint of metal. I took my pen knife from my pocket and used the smaller of the two blades to gently move some of the dirt. On the ring finger, pushed down on the first knuckle of the hand, was a ring. I slipped the blade between the ring and the bone, lifting it free, then used the knife to slide the bone back to its resting place. The light on the ring gave me chills, much more so than the sight of the bones. It was gold—a crescent of rubies around a small, marquis diamond. It was the ring from the journal, the ring that Amanda Baron had accepted as a testament of Big Frank’s love. The concrete I had moved was, without question, the cover of Amanda Baron’s crypt.
I pushed the ring and the knife deep into my pocket and slid the concrete back into place.
“What the hell’s going on?” Travis asked. “What’re you doing?”
“Comin’ up.” I put the head of the sledge in the crease of my elbow and my foot in the loop. “Bring ’er up.”
I could hear the whine of the motor as it lifted me toward the opening. It was a long, slow ride—a trip to the dentist, the long walk to the principal’s office, but worse. I wondered what he would do when he realized that his dad, in fact, had killed his mother?
Travis stopped the winch as my head neared the two planks and grabbed the sledge. I put my left hand on the top rim of the cistern and the right on the nearest plank, and Travis winched me up until I could step away from the hole.
“Nothing?” Travis asked.
I turned on the flashlight and handed it to him, then reached into my pocket and pressed the ring into his open palm. “I’m sorry I busted your chops about looking down there.” I think he knew what it was before it was hit by the light. I stood beside him as he inspected the ring. There was nothing to say. His dad was a murderer, and the remains of his mother lay beneath a concrete slab at the bottom of an abandoned cistern on Shaft Row. Travis sat cross-legged at the edge of the cistern and tried to fight back tears.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Travis bought a rusting 1958 Rambler from Keltenecker Used Cars for a hundred dollars, and I would argue that even that was too much. It was an oil-burning heap with a dog of a push-button transmission that you had to continually monkey with to get into reverse. Snookie was working at McKinstry’s Sunoco, and every other day he would fill a gallon jug of used crankcase oil for Travis to use in the Rambler.
“You can’t put that used oil in your car,” Snookie had protested when Travis first made the request. “It’ll ruin it.”
“Snook, it burns oil so fast, it won’t be in there long enough to hurt anything.”
The Rambler had been on Mr. Keltenecker’s lot for months, and I’m sure he was glad to get rid of it. Despite the plume of white smoke that followed us everywhere, and the fact that Travis couldn’t get it into reverse—I had to push it backward out of his parking space at school—Travis was happy for the cheap transportation.
It was early May when Travis eased the Rambler into the gravel parking lot on the river side of the main entrance of Ohio Valley Cement and Masonry Company. When he cut the lights, the security guard’s flashlight came on and he walked toward the car, not shining the light directly on Travis until he stepped out of the car. As soon as he recognized Travis, Tornik holstered the flashlight and walked up to the chain-link fence. “Well, well, if it isn’t the intrepid detectives.”
Tornik looked bad. It had been ten months since we had last seen him, but he seemed to have aged dramati
cally. He was grayer, and the lines that creased his forehead and cheeks ran deep through his face, giving it a reptilian appearance. The rough life and booze appeared to be overtaking him at a gallop. The omnipresent cigarette wasn’t doing him any good, either, and he was developing a deep smoker’s cough that was painful to hear. Travis leaned against the fence, clinging to it above his head. “Can we talk? I promise not to be a smart ass.”
Tornik checked his watch. “Sure. I’ve got a few minutes.” He walked through the open front gate and pointed toward his car, which was just a few spaces down from Travis’s. I got into the back seat and let Travis have the front.
Spring had been slow creeping into the Upper Ohio River Valley. Travis was wearing a denim jacket and jeans. Despite the chill, he rolled down the window of Tornik’s Pontiac to vent the cigarette smoke. “Didn’t expect to ever see you again. What’s up?” Tornik asked.
“You were right,” Travis said. “All along, you were right.” He turned and looked at Tornik. “He killed her. My dad murdered my mom.”
Tornik took a long drag on his cigarette and slowly allowed the smoke to escape his mouth. “Sounds like you’re convinced. What made you change your mind?”
Travis held up the ring. “Among other things, this.”
Tornik took it from Travis and inspected the ring. “I’ll bite. What’s this have to do with anything?”
“That’s my mother’s ring, the one my dad gave her when they were dating, just before they got married. She wrote about it in her journal, and she was wearing it the night she died.”
Tornik turned on the dome light and examined the ring a little more closely, trying to see if there was something particular about it that he was missing. “So, where’d you get it?”
“Off her finger,” Travis said.
He turned his head and frowned. “Excuse me?”