Three More Dogs in a Row

by Neil Plakcy

  The contemplative nature of the service stayed with me. I hadn’t been to a Quaker Meeting since, but I associated the Stewart’s Crossing Meeting with that sense of stillness and peace. It was so different from the hubbub all around us, as it looked like everyone I’d noticed at the Harvest Festival was gathering there. I held tight to Rochester’s leash as an attractive woman in her early thirties hurried toward us.

  “Is there a problem here?” she asked. She was wearing the standard costume of a suburban mom: a plaid blouse that tied around her waist, hot pink pedal pushers, and matching pink sneakers. She also wore a round button that said, “I’m a Quaker! Ask me about our worship.”

  Her blonde ponytail was cinched with a pink scrunchie and she had a small blond boy by the hand. “What’s everyone looking at?”

  The crowd had obeyed Lili’s request to stay back, but that didn’t prevent them from craning their necks and looking around each other, trying to get a clearer view.

  “You don’t want to take your little boy any closer,” I said. “The police are on their way.”

  “Police? Why? What’s happened?” She looked from us to the Meeting and then back. “I’m Hannah Palmer. I’m the clerk of the Meeting.” From my studies with Mrs. Shea, way back when, I knew that meant she was the volunteer responsible for administrative functions. “Why are the police coming?”

  “Steve Levitan,” I said. “This is Lili Weinstock, and the big dog is Rochester. I’m afraid he might have disturbed your construction area. He found a disintegrating tennis shoe. And it looks like there’s a human bone inside.”

  “Oh, how awful! Just one bone?” She shivered. “Or is it a whole skeleton?” She frowned. “You’re sure it’s not some prankster getting ready for Halloween?”

  “All we can see is the sneaker,” I said. “It doesn’t look like a prank, though.”

  Her hand was shaking as she pulled a walkie-talkie from the pocket of her pink slacks and pressed a key, then spoke. “This is Hannah, and I need help at the front lawn. Any volunteer who’s not in the middle of something, please come up here right away.”

  She slipped the walkie-talkie back in her pocket. “I’ll get some of our members to help with crowd control,” she said. “The building wasn’t even supposed to be opened up now. We haven’t raised all the money we need, but after the last couple of weeks of rain, our contractor thought he’d get a head start on the renovation while the weather was fair, without realizing that we had Harvest Days upcoming.”

  Close up I could see the tell-tale signs that contractors had passed that way – ruts in the grass, paper building permit in a plastic sleeve by the front door, stockpile of stone by the side wall. But there was no evidence that any of them were there that day.

  The little boy tugged on my pant leg and asked, “Can I pet your dog?”

  “Nathaniel, not now,” Hannah said.

  “It’s okay,” I said. “Rochester, sit.”

  He plopped his golden butt down on the thin grass of the front lawn, and the boy held out his hand for Rochester to lick. “Nathaniel wants a dog,” Hannah said. “I’m afraid he gets very excited whenever he sees one.”

  Well, for a long time I had wanted a child, I thought. After my ex-wife had two miscarriages I had accepted that we don’t always get what we want. It was the way of life; this little boy would endure disappointments small and large (there’s no more ice cream, you can’t have a car just because you got your driver’s license, broken heart and failure of ambition.) And he would survive, if he was lucky.

  Hannah, Lili and I stood around awkwardly as Nathaniel petted Rochester, until a group of people converged on us, all of them wearing the same “I’m a Quaker” buttons, and Hannah stepped aside to speak with them, taking Nathaniel with her. He cast one longing glance back, like Lot’s wife leaving Sodom or Orpheus unable to resist checking for Eurydice and something in his plaintive look made my heart twang. The discovery of the body must have upset me more than I realized.

  “I want to take some pictures for Rick,” Lili said. “I won’t disturb anything but I can get better shots than he could with his phone or whatever little camera he has. I’ll be back.”

  She moved closer to the Meeting House and began snapping shots. I followed her, still holding Rochester at bay, and noted that the summer rains, in conjunction with the reconstruction, had eroded the wood where the building’s exterior wall met its foundation. Fresh scratch marks indicated where Rochester had moved away the dirt to reveal the shoe behind the disintegrating wall. It was like peeling the surface of the world away to see the rot and heartbreak beneath it.

  All I could see was the sneaker and the whitened bone sticking out of it, but I was almost certain there had to be a body behind it. Lili leaned forward, crouched down, fiddled with her lenses. I could see her professionalism and her experience in tough situations in every action.

  A pair of uniformed officers came through the crowd, the community’s protection against the darkness always around us, and took over from the volunteers Hannah Palmer had arranged in a cordon around the Meeting House. Lili explained to them what she was doing, and they left her alone. One officer began to lay out yellow crime scene tape, our modern ritual of creating a sacred space, an ephemeral Stonehenge that wouldn’t last more than a day. The other pulled out a pad and began taking names of people in the crowd.

  Rick Stemper approached a couple of minutes later. For the most part, he looked as he had when we were acquaintances at Pennsbury High, more than twenty-five years before --unruly mop of brown hair, broad shoulders, athletic build. The only changes were bags below his eyes and a couple of laugh lines around his mouth.

  He was in plain clothes, though his police badge was pinned to the waistband of his khaki slacks. The tail of his short-sleeved blue and white check shirt was out, which I knew meant that he had his gun on his belt.

  “How does this keep happening, Steve?” he asked, when he reached us. He leaned down to scratch Rochester’s neck. “And you? Are you some kind of murder magnet?” The dog just grinned.

  “You don’t know it’s murder,” I said.

  “Yeah, guys in sneakers die of natural causes inside old buildings all the time.” Rick shook his head and walked past us and stepped over the crime scene tape. I watched as he pulled a Dodger-blue latex glove from his pocket and slipped it on his right hand. Then he crouched beside the building and carefully peered in through the gap, our Stewart’s Crossing Sherlock trying to intuit the past from a collection of random details.

  He stood up and made a call on his cell phone, then walked back over to us. “I have to get some stuff from my car, and then I’m going inside. Hang around until I get a chance to see what’s going on. I want to talk to you. In the meantime keep the death dog away from the evidence, all right?”

  He walked back toward Main Street, and I knelt down next to Rochester. “You’re not a death dog, are you, boy?”

  Rochester woofed and nodded his big shaggy head. Then he licked my face.

  One of the volunteers milling around the Meeting House was my childhood piano teacher, Edith Passis. She had been a friend of my parents, and I remembered her as a younger woman at parties at our house, her black hair teased into a beehive, wearing glasses that feathered up at the edges and thigh-high black leather boots. She had true Black Irish looks—coal-black hair, pale white skin and bright blue eyes.

  Now her hair had gone stark white, and a medication she took tinted her skin a salmon-pink. Though I’d never say it to her face, I thought she looked like a gerbil, as if she ate chopped lettuce at every meal and lived in a pile of shredded newspaper. Her blue eyes were still clear, and she was as sweet-natured and patient as she’d been when I was struggling to learn the fingering for “The Caisson Song.”

  “Hello, Steve,” she said, coming up to me. “What’s all the fuss?” She bent down to stroke Rochester’s head.

  “Rochester found a sneaker down there, where the clapboard has eroded away fro
m the foundation. Looks like it might be attached to a body.”

  She looked back up quickly. “A body? How terrible. Someone local? Or a visitor?”

  “Don’t know yet.”

  She put her hand up to her mouth and her eyes crinkled in sadness. You couldn’t get to Edith’s age, somewhere in her seventies, without experiencing pain: the general (war, famine, natural disasters) to the personal (death of her beloved husband, betrayal of her piano-trained hands to arthritis.)

  I noticed she was wearing the same round button and to distract her, I asked, “Do you belong to the Meeting?” I’d always thought Edith was Jewish, because I saw her sometimes at our synagogue in Trenton.

  “I was born a Quaker,” she said. “When Lou was alive I went to synagogue with him sometimes, but I always felt like a Friend in my heart. After he passed I found a lot of comfort in coming here.” She shook her head. “But there was a lot of discord over this construction project. Very un-Quaker.”

  “Why the discord?” Rochester kept straining to go back to the sneaker he’d found and I had to keep a close rein on his leash.

  A light breeze swept through the property, scattering some of the dead leaves at the bases of the trees. “A lot of people don’t like change,” she said. “When you get to my age… it seemed like such a big project, so much money, so much disruption.”

  “What kind of work is being done? Expansion?”

  “More like reconfiguring. Our membership has been shrinking, and we don’t need such a large meeting room anymore. We offer space to a lot of non-profit groups, and Hannah Palmer felt we needed to remodel and create more intimate spaces, both for our worship and for these other groups.”

  “Other members disagreed with her?”

  “Politely, of course,” Edith said. “But Hannah is a very strong woman, and deeply spiritual, as well. I knew her family when she was growing up. She was always such a serious child.” She shook her head. “We’re a dying breed, we Friends. We’ve never been ones to proselytize, and so many of our young people are seduced away from silence and contemplation by the noise of the world. Hannah has revitalized our Meeting, even if I don’t always agree with her policies.”

  Edith waved at a tall, cadaverous-looking man with stringy white hair down to his shoulders. “That’s Eben Hosford,” she said to me. “He’s been the most vocal opponent to the Meeting House renovation. I’m surprised to see him here.”

  “Looks like an old hippie,” I said. He wore faded jeans torn at the knees and a plaid long-sleeved shirt that was too big for his skeletal frame. Around his neck was some kind of Native American dream catcher, all feathers and leather strips.

  Edith left me to walk over to him. Rick returned with a utility belt wrapped around his waist and toting a flashlight, more of the bright blue plastic gloves, and one of those life-saver tools you can use to cut a seat belt or smash out a windshield.

  He nodded as he walked past. I noticed that Lili had moved away from the Meeting House, and was taking candid shots of the Harvest Festival. I leaned against the trunk of a red maple, Rochester sprawled at my feet, and watched the passing traffic -- a couple of high school band members on break, a plump Indian woman in a red and gold sari, a smattering of suburban parents and kids, and a tall black woman with a regal posture and massive gold hoop earrings. An interesting mix of the Stewart’s Crossing I remembered and the new world order.

  I looked back at the dark blue high-top sneaker, visible in the gap between clapboard and foundation. It was a Converse Chuck Taylor; I owned several pairs like it when I was a kid. The white sole was smudged with dirt, as was the canvas, but I could see the round logo with Converse All-Stars in red wrapped around a blue star.

  It was adult size, probably belonging to a teenage boy or a young man. It was covered with a sheen of dust, so looked like it had been there behind the wall for a long time. How could that be? Had the Friends never noticed the smell of a dead body? Was it in some long-ignored closet?

  Who had worn it? A Stewart’s Crossing kid like me? But how had his body ended up behind a wall in the Friends’ Meeting House? And when? I felt the tingling of curiosity and I was excited, but worried too. I knew the kind of trouble my curiosity had gotten me into in the past.

  3 – False Wall

  Lili returned, her camera back around her neck, and Rochester hopped up. “I stopped by Gail’s table. Her mother is there, and she’s doing fine. Rick show up yet?”

  “He’s inside,” I said, as he emerged from the double doors. The crowd was still clustered around the corner of the building where Rochester had discovered the sneaker, so when Rick waved, Lili, the dog and I walked over to him.

  “Afternoon, Lili,” he said. “Can you hold onto Rochester for a couple of minutes? I need Joe Hardy here to walk inside with me.”

  I’d helped Rick out a couple of times with cases by then, and I’d graduated in his estimation from Nancy Drew – who worked on her own—to Joe Hardy, the younger of the two Hardy Boys. I had grudgingly accepted that since he had the badge he got to be older brother, Frank.

  “What do you need?” I asked.

  “There’s a false wall at the back of a closet, right on the corner of the building where the shoe is. I don’t want to knock through the wall until I know what’s back there, so I want to climb up through an access panel in the ceiling and see if I can look down. There’s a ladder I can use, but I need somebody to hold it. I’d pull a uniform, but you know we’re a small department, and we’re already stretched thin between crowd control here and traffic duty out on Main Street.”

  “Sure.” I handed Rochester’s leash to Lili, but as I started to walk away he pulled to go along with me. “You stay here, boy,” I said. He barked a couple of times then sat on his butt with a disappointed look on his face. He wasn’t happy to be left out.

  On our way in, Rick was buttonholed by Hannah Palmer. A few strands of blonde hair had come loose, and she looked harried. “You aren’t going to make us shut down the Harvest Festival, are you?” she asked. “Because that would be a nightmare.”

  “No ma’am,” Rick said. “If there was a crime committed here it was a long time ago, and as long as we can keep people away from the building we should be fine.”

  “But they can still get into the kitchen, right? We make money from the food.”

  “Yes, they can.” He put his hand on her arm. “We’ll do our best not to disrupt things.”

  She thanked him and walked away. “You were awfully nice to her,” I said, as Rick led the way into the Meeting House.

  “The mayor’s a Quaker, if you’ve forgotten. Plus I feel sorry for her. This Festival is a big deal, and it’s not her fault your dog dug up an old corpse.”

  I snorted but followed him inside. The main room was as I remembered it, with a central aisle and rows of ancient wooden pews parallel to each of the four walls. Severe, in a colonial America kind of way, plain and spare. Since their worship involved silent waiting for God with no ritual, there was no need for an altar, as you’d find in a synagogue or a church. Older members could sit on raised benches along the far wall, allowing them to be seen and heard.

  I didn’t think I’d make a very good Quaker. I didn’t have the patience for stillness, too much going on in my brain. Rochester and I were alike that way, always curious about the world and eager to snoop around.

  At the center of the space was a short table where someone – the clerk, for example – could stand to address the Meeting. Rick led me between the pews to a single door set into the back wall. Before he stepped through, he handed me a pair of the blue gloves. “I’d tell you not to touch anything, but I know you.”

  I didn’t bother to complain. Rick was right; I was a nosy guy, a lot like my dog.

  I put the gloves on and followed him, feeling like we were a couple of weird Star Trek aliens with bright blue hands. We stepped gingerly into a warren of small offices and storage rooms. Red and black wires looped down from the ceiling beside
the bent frames of aluminum studs and holes knocked through drywall. The smell of sawdust hung in the air.

  A locked metal tool cabinet, dinged and banged from hard use, stood to one side, beside a pile of buckets and hoses. Rick turned right and stopped in front of the open door to a storage closet. “This is as close as we can get to where the body is.” He held up his hand and we listened. We could hear the buzz of the crowd outside, under the blare of the jazz band.

  “It’s tight in there. I managed to get the ladder set up but it’s pretty rickety.”

  He turned on his flashlight and stepped inside, and I followed. He stuck the flashlight between his shoulder and his neck, gripped the ladder, and started to climb.

  I stood behind him, holding the ladder steady. He pushed up on the access panel, but it didn’t move. “Is it screwed shut?” I asked.

  “No, just stuck.” He pulled a screwdriver from his belt and inserted it between the edge of the panel and the ceiling, and applied pressure. “Come on, you mother,” he grunted.

  Suddenly the panel gave way, and Rick nearly toppled backwards. I had to head-butt his ass to keep him up there. I grabbed his flashlight before it hit the floor.

  He uttered a few curse words that would have gotten us a long detention back at Pennsbury High, and then managed to get the panel flipped up on its hinge. He stepped up higher on the ladder, which creaked ominously, and poked his head over the edge. “Light,” he said, and I handed the flashlight up to him.

  He looked down. “Tight fit in here,” he said. “But I can see a skull, and a jumble of bones and fragments of what look like dusty old clothes. There’s an old ladder in there, too, I guess for climbing down the other side. Whoever it is must have died in there, because I don’t see any other way in besides this panel. Crime scene will tell me if any animals have gotten in somehow.”