by Neil Plakcy
He climbed back down the ladder, and I backed out of the storage closet. His head had a sifting of dust on it that made his hair look almost gray. He shook it out and wiped the back of his hand across his face.
The solemnity of what he’d found must have hit us both, because neither of us said anything. I was reminded of the veterans outside, how much death they must have seen in their service. Cold, damp primeval European forests, vast arid deserts, cluttered warrens of blasted-out houses – death was the same wherever you encountered it, whether a battlefield or a place of worship.
Rick led the way down the hall to the brown metal tool cabinet we had passed on our way in. It was, about six feet long and two feet high, and the top was closed with a cheap keyed padlock. He pulled a leatherette pack from a pouch on his belt which opened to reveal a set of metal lock picks.
“My dad had a set like that once,” I said. “I wonder what ever happened to it.”
“Your dad was a burglar?”
“Nah, he just bought every random kind of tool he could find at the flea market.”
Rick chose one of the picks and inserted it into the bottom of the padlock. As he grunted and twisted I asked, “Any particular reason why we’re breaking in there?”
“Because there’s probably a drywall saw inside.” The lock clicked and popped open, and Rick lifted the lid. “Yup, here’s what I need.” He grabbed a wicked-looking gizmo with a rubber handle and a long serrated blade that ended in a sharp point.
“Watch and learn, brother Joe,” Rick said.
I followed him back to the storage closet, and we worked together to drag all the boxes and accumulated junk into the hallway. When the wall that separated the closet from the hidden space was clear, Rick knelt on the floor and jabbed the drywall saw into it. He cut across a horizontal line, then stopped to take a break.
“Why didn’t you cut your way in at first?” I asked. “Why go to the trouble of climbing up above to look down?”
He wiped the sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand and sat back. “I wanted to see what was there before I cut in,” he said. “Could have been a whole pile of bones in there, and cutting through without looking could have damaged the scene.”
“I get it. Want me to give it a try?” I asked.
“Sure. But be careful; that handle gets slippery.”
I turned the blade ninety degrees and began sawing downward. I wasn’t that handy as a kid; my father used to get nervous when I hung around his workbench, afraid I’d impale myself on a putty knife or cut my arm off with the circular saw. But becoming a homeowner, in California and then back in Stewart’s Crossing, had brought out some latent talent my father hadn’t seen.
The drywall was old and rotted, which made it tougher to cut a straight line. Flakes peeled off and fell to the ground, dandruff of the dead. When I finished, I scooted back from the wall. I gave the saw back to Rick to complete the cutting, but instead he reached in and pulled the piece away by the two open sides.
“Flashlight?” he asked.
I handed it to him and he shone it into the narrow space between the drywall and the outside wall. I leaned over his shoulder to look in. It was about six feet deep, and maybe ten feet long. As Rick had mentioned, there was a very old ladder inside, leaning against the far wall.
“How the hell did somebody get a body in there, if the only way in or out is through that trap door?” I asked.
“Whoever belongs to those bones had to have climbed up a ladder in the closet, like I did, gone up through the ceiling and down the old ladder inside,” Rick said. “Maybe to hide. I remember learning in school that this Meeting House was one of the stops on the Underground Railroad.”
“Nineteenth-century slaves didn’t wear Chucks,” I said, using our old nickname for the Chuck Taylor-branded sneaker Rochester had found. “Could you search through missing persons reports for somebody wearing that kind of shoe?” I backed away and stood up.
“It’ll be a nightmare,” he said. “We have no time frame yet, and no real geographic restraints. This guy could have gone missing in Alaska, for all we know. And there’s no way to search by a single criteria, like kind of shoe. I’d have to read through every report for the last forty years. I’m going to wait until I have more information.”
He stood up and brushed his pants. That motion reminded me of my dad, finishing up at his basement workbench, clearing curls of metal and wood before going upstairs to rejoin the family. “There are a lot more questions than answers in that little space. And the next one is who knew that about this false wall. That could lead us somewhere.”
“The Meeting House is a public building,” I said. “Anybody can walk in, especially on a day like today when the whole town is here.”
“But you’d have to know that this space was here. Someone who was familiar with the Meeting House knew about the false wall, and this area behind it.”
“One of the Friends? That’s so out of character. And the body’s too old to be connected to the construction project.”
“Just because you wear a button that says, ‘Hi, I’m a Quaker’ doesn’t mean you wouldn’t kill someone,” Rick said.
We stepped back into the hallway, and saw two guys in plain clothes approaching, each carrying what looked like a heavy bag. “Afternoon, detective,” one of them said. “Crime scene in there?”
Rick nodded. “You’re going to need to remove more of the wall to get clear access.” He turned to me. “Thanks for your help, but the cavalry is here now.”
“Sure. You still want me and Lili to hang around?”
“Nah, I’m good. I know where to find you.”
I did want to hang around and snoop – but I knew that without a badge, I would be in the way. I walked back out into the brilliant sunshine, shading my eyes from the glare. I couldn’t help considering which of the people in the crowd might have a hidden crime in his or her past. The Latino guy in hospital scrubs, his wraparound sunglasses on the back of his head? The bald guy in the Metallica T-shirt? The plump grandmother in a souvenir Hawaiian muumuu? Could one of the elderly volunteers be hiding a dark secret behind their "friendly" badges?
4 – Physician for the Circus
I shivered despite the autumn heat, and looked around for Lili and Rochester but couldn’t see them. That was curious. Was she taking pictures somewhere? Had she gone back to Gail’s to help out?
As I prowled, I passed a table of old tools that reminded me of my father, and I thought again about the owner of the sneaker. If he’d been a young man, would his parents still be alive, wondering what had happened to him? When I’d gone through the boxes my father left behind after his death, I’d found a tarnished copper POW-MIA bracelet, and I recognized the last name on it as one of my father’s co-workers. I vaguely remembered the man had a son who went missing in Vietnam, and wondered if my father had ever worn the bracelet, or had purchased it out of solidarity.
I couldn’t remember what happened to that bracelet, and I didn’t know if the son had ever been found. But from what I remembered of the father, the boy had never been forgotten.
I stopped in front of a table with a sign that read “Semper Fiber.” The woman behind it had created needlepoints of the Marine motto and other symbols. The next table was occupied by that cadaverous old man Edith had mentioned, selling an array of scented candles and soaps. There was something discordant about the soaps wrapped in pretty paper and tied with ribbon and the creepy affect of the man, so I hurried past.
People had gone back to their enjoyment of the fair, pushing aside the discovery of the body like an uncomfortable article in the Boat-Gazette. How could they, I wondered? Didn’t they realize that there had been a person who ate, drank, lived, who was now dead? Was there someone out there with a hole in his or her heart where the memory of that person belonged?
I scoured the property until I found Lili and Rochester beneath the shade of an ancient oak tree at the very back.
“What’s
going on?” Lili asked when I reached her. “You look like you’ve been prospecting in a mine.”
Rochester popped up like a puppet on a string and placed his front paws on my pants. I could see he was still annoyed that he’d been left out of the investigation. I pushed him back down, but then scratched behind his ears and told him he was a good boy.
“I had to help Rick get the wall open,” I said, when I straightened up.
“What did you find? A whole body?”
“I guess so. A skull, some bones, and some faded old clothes. And the other shoe.”
“You think someone broke in during the construction and left the remains there?”
I shook my head. “The bones were covered in dust. They’ve been there a long time.” I looked around. We were at least twenty feet from the nearest table, at the edge of the woods I had explored as a kid, collecting pine cones, chasing squirrels. Smell of leaf mold, crunch of dead leaves, dappling of sunlight amid shadow. “How about you? What are you doing way back here?”
“I’m hiding from Peter Bobeaux.” She gave the name an exaggerated French pronunciation. “The new assistant dean for the humanities. He and his wife were walking their yappy little poodle and I knew Rochester would go wild, and I’d get roped into some boring conversation.”
I couldn’t get past the guy’s name, and for the first time since I saw the sneaker in Rochester’s mouth I laughed. “Professor Bobo?” I asked. “Sounds like he teaches at the clown college.”
“Dr. Bobeaux, if you please,” Lili said, and spelled it. “He grew up in West Virginia, but he got his Ph.D. in French literature from a university in Canada.”
“Better yet,” I said. “Doctor Bobo, physician for the circus, wearing a white lab coat and a round red nose.”
Lili snorted with laughter and took my arm. “You are very bad. Now every time I see him I’ll be thinking that.”
“How’d you get a new assistant dean anyway?” The woods formed a kind of horseshoe around the Meeting House property, and we began walking along the edge of the lawn toward Main Street. “I thought Dr. Jellicoe was pretty entrenched in that position.”
“Fran? Her husband retired in June, and they decided they’d always wanted to join the Peace Corps and see the third world.”
“Which you’ve seen plenty of.”
She nodded. In her career, photographing and writing about everything from blood diamonds to Somali pirates to ethnic strife in the former Soviet Union, she had been to almost every shady place on earth. The only spots she’d missed were the ones favored by tourists—she’d never spent much time in Western Europe, for example, never been to Hawaii or Tahiti or Alaska. I was happy there were at least a few sights we could see together for the first time.
“We were lucky to get someone with good credentials as a last-minute hire,” Lili said. “He’s the interim assistant dean right now; we’ll have to do a full search this year.”
“I wonder what he was doing that he could jump into a job on such short notice.”
“He was working for a private university in one of the Gulf Coast emirates, and when the owner got in trouble with the authorities, they shut the place down on short notice.”
As we approached Main Street, and the edge of the Harvest Festival, she stopped and pointed toward a couple of farm stands, rough wooden tables piled with cascades of eggplant, neat rows of tomatoes with bits of vine still attached, lettuce and mushrooms and sweet corn still in the husk. “I want to get some produce for dinner tonight.”
“What are we having?”
“Whatever’s fresh.”
I followed her along the edge of the lawn toward Main Street. I saw her scanning the crowd and assumed she was trying to avoid the amusingly named Dr. Bobeaux. I imagined a man in a graduation gown with a mortarboard squashed over an exuberant red fright wig.
When we reached the farm stands, Lili examined the vegetables as if they were expensive jewels. “I’m going to slice this zucchini and load it with sliced tomatoes and parmesan cheese,” she said, handing me a pile of the speckled green vegetables. “You can grill it for me. As a main course, I thought we’d do a big salad with grilled chicken, if that’s good for you.”
“Sounds delicious.”
While I stood back with a tight rein on Rochester to prevent him from gobbling up whatever was at his level, Lili gathered her ingredients. She picked out three kinds of lettuce, red and yellow tomatoes, raw mushrooms, and green and yellow peppers. “Strawberry pie?” she asked. When I agreed, she had me pick out a couple of good pints.
“We’re going to be working all afternoon to get this meal together,” I complained.
She raised an eyebrow. “You have something else planned?”
“No, nothing,” I said, holding up my hands. “Just helping you.”
“Good answer.”
We managed to leave the festival grounds without running into Lili’s new boss and with Rochester in the lead, we walked back up to my car. Traffic still crept, safety-conscious parents in their boxy Volvos and Saabs, soccer moms in massive SUVs, older guys with trophy wives in expensive convertibles. Crinkled leaves in the gutters, an abandoned paper plate of half-eaten funnel cake, tiny pink ballet slipper, Barbie having to go en pointe missing one toe shoe.
I’d parked in my secret spot, at the rear of the hardware store behind a screen of maples. My dad was a friend of the store’s owner when I was a kid, and we’d parked there for every parade and festival throughout my childhood. I had a feeling I was one of the few people in town who knew about those three spaces, tree roots pushing up under the blacktop, hidden to all but the cognoscenti.
We had to wait a long time for a break in traffic so I could pull onto Main Street, and as I drummed my fingers on the steering wheel I thought again about the body we had discovered. Who was he? What was he doing at the Meeting House? I kept gnawing away at those questions, without finding any answers, all the way home.
I pulled up in my driveway and we unloaded the car. “All that fresh air has made me sleepy,” Lili said as she put the veggies away. “You feel like a nap before dinner?”
“Great idea.” We went upstairs and snuggled together, with Rochester on the floor by my side of the bed. Lili slipped off quickly, but I sat up, thinking about my life.
Lili was aware of my background, that I’d spent a year in a California prison for hacking, and that I was still on parole after that conviction. After my ex-wife Mary’s first miscarriage, she’d nearly ruined us with retail therapy, and when we lost the second child, I thought by breaking in to the major credit bureaus and placing a red flag on Mary’s account I could keep her from running up thousands of dollars in new charges. That hadn’t worked out the way I expected, ending in jail time and divorce.
Lili had also seen me use my hacking skills in helping the police in the past. But she had grown worried that my itchy fingers and my arrogance would get me into trouble again, and she and Rick had staged an intervention a couple of months before. I acknowledged that I had a problem, gave Rick the laptop I’d been using for hacking, and joined an online support group for ex-hackers.
After prison, where my time was controlled, I had been lost, not sure what I wanted to do with my freedom. Rochester had been a mixed blessing, because when he came into my life I had to become responsible for him. I got his unconditional love, but sometimes I resented having to wake early on a cold morning and walk him, the way when I was surfing online, he would put his head in my lap to get me to play. Didn’t he know how freeing it was for me when my hands were on a keyboard and my brain was exploring cyberspace?
I no longer resented those interruptions; I reminded myself how much I enjoyed being with him, and how my life had become so much better once he joined me.
I still loved to forget myself in a flurry of online activity – reading emails, following Facebook links, searching for arcane information. But now I also wanted to be with Lili, and there was a tension between those two desires. Fortuna
tely, she needed her space as much as I did, and I had no complaints when she disappeared into a darkroom or wandered off with her camera in search of inspiration.
In that way, Lili was a much better match for me than Mary. My ex-wife needed the validation of the outside world, had to be with people, share her opinions with them, meet friends for drinks and colleagues for coffee. I was happiest when I was at the computer by myself, shutting out the rest of the world.
Though I knew Mary and I had been happy together at times, all I could remember were the bad things about my marriage – dragging behind her on slow shopping expeditions for the perfect sofa for the living room; listening to her endless complaints about her mother, who was cold and listened to too much AM radio; and her rants that I didn’t have enough ambition, didn’t make enough money. But had those been my problems all along, and would I end up in the same pattern with Lili?
5 – Baggage Claim
I woke about an hour later to Rochester sniffing my face. I sat up, yawned and looked at the clock. Lili stirred beside me. “Dinner time?” she asked.
“Rochester thinks so.”
“Well, then, we should get cooking.” She sat up and smiled.
“I keep thinking about that sneaker,” I said, down in the kitchen, as I sliced a couple of zucchini. “I wonder if I can find anything online that might help Rick establish when it was made.”
“I can email you the pictures I took of it after dinner,” Lili said. “I got a bunch of good close-ups of the shoe and the markings. I figured they’d be useful to Rick.”
“Only Rick?”
“Well, I knew you’d help him.”
Neither Lili nor Rick minded my dabbling in online investigation, as long as I didn’t break any laws. I cleaned up the zucchini debris and retrieved a package of boneless chicken breasts from the fridge. Then Rochester accompanied me outside, where I fired up my portable grill and he stretched out on the grass beside it, hoping for some stray bits of chicken to fall his way.