The Body In The Basement ff-6

by Katherine Hall Page

  Pix was debating whether to fol ow up Samantha's comment with a veiled inquiry as to what Samantha might be ashamed of that would lead her to make a comment like this. She stepped into the sunlight; news that Samantha was running a lunch-money extortion ring at school would have been welcome compared with the news that greeted her eyes.

  Seth Marshal hadn't done a thing since Memorial Day.

  No, she quickly took it back. An ancient cement mixer had been brought in and there were empty cans of soda and other potables on the ground, nestled next to Twinkies wrappers and squashed Mother Goose potato chip bags.

  “Mom! Didn't you say they would be framing the house by now?”

  Pix was speechless. She nodded dismal y. The Fairchilds hoped to move in at the end of the summer.

  They'd be lucky if the roof was on before bad weather struck.

  Her anger mounted, and she found her vocal cords worked after al . "Wait until I get hold of Seth! This is total y inexcusable!" Pix's voice, which at times like these assumed the strident tones of a sideshow barker by way of the Winsor School and Pembroke, rang out indignantly in the crisp Maine morning air. She strode to the edge of the hole where the basement was supposed to be, the dogs fol owing at her heels. "I know he's not dead or injured. It would have been in The Island Crier." The Mil ers subscribed to the Sanpere weekly paper year-round. Next to Organic Gardening, it was Pix's favorite reading material. "He'd better have a pretty darn good excuse!"

  “Look over here," Samantha cal ed. She was behind a stand of birches the Fairchilds had specified be left. "Aren't these the things they use to stiffen the concrete? It must mean they're going to do it soon. They wouldn't leave them here to rust”

  Pix went over to get a closer look.

  “You're right. These are reinforcing rods, and here are some anchor bolts. But even if they pour tomorrow, we're stil weeks behind schedule. And in any case, they couldn't pour any concrete without putting in the footing forms, and I don't see any sign of them.”

  Samantha tried to cheer her mother up. "Come on, let's go down to the shore and eat our sandwiches. It's not like it's your fault. Mrs. Fairchild wil understand." Samantha correctly zeroed in on the thing Pix was dreading—tel ing Faith.

  “I know, but I'm so mad at Seth, I could scream.

  Promises, promises. I should have known better and cal ed him every day."

  “Wel , scream if you want to. It wil make you feel better.

  Tiffany Morrison says her therapist told her to, and it's awesome"

  “Why is Tiffany seeing a therapist?" Pix was suddenly sidetracked. The Morrisons owned a real estate agency in Aleford and had always seemed like the perfect apple-pie family. Maybe that was the trouble.

  “Oh, you know, the eating thing. She won't eat anything, then she eats like crazy. I think she first started doing it to get her parents' attention. They're always so busy. Then it kind of got out of hand. She tel s us about it in gym, and it's total y gross. But she's doing okay now. I guess the screams worked.”

  They both laughed, then Pix said, "Real y, an eating disorder is no laughing matter."

  “That's not what we're laughing at," Samantha pointed out sensibly. Sometimes she thought the term guilt trip had been coined for her mother.

  Pix felt much better. She'd cal Seth as soon as she got home. Then once she pinned him down to a firm date—

  and she would tel him she would be there watching—she'd phone the Fairchilds and might providential y get Tom.

  She cal ed to the dogs. Dusty and Henry came running from the woods, barking happy doggy greetings as if they had been crossing the country for months, desperately trying to find their people. But the third dog did not emerge from the greenery.

  “Artie! Artie! Arthur Mil er! Come now! Do you see him, Samantha?"

  “No, but he can't be far. He never strays from the others.”

  Pix found him immediately. "Oh, naughty, naughty dog!”

  Artie was down in the cel ar hole, digging furiously. He glanced up at the sound of his mistress's voice, then went back to his work.

  “What is he doing? He must have found an animal bone.”

  Pix jumped in, landing on the soft earth. She went over to the dog and grabbed his col ar. "Stop it this instant!" As she pul ed the dog away, she noticed that what he had unearthed was not a bone, but a piece of fabric.

  “Samantha, look what Artie's found. I think it's part of an old quilt."

  “I'l get something to dig with."

  “It's probably in tatters. Remember the beautiful Dresden Plate quilt I saw in the back of Sonny Prescott's pickup? He was using it to pile logs on, to keep the truck clean!"

  “Here's a stick. It was al I could find.”

  Pix took it from her and scraped away the dirt. So far, the quilt seemed to be in good shape.

  “It looks like a nice one. I love the red-and-white quilts,"

  Sam said excitedly.

  “Me, too." Pix crouched down and tugged at the cloth.

  "It's Drunkard's Path. I've always meant to do one, but sewing al those curves seems much harder than straight lines."

  “Artie, sit!" The dog had come to her side, about to resume his labors. The other two were looking over the edge of the excavation, puzzled expressions on their faces.

  At least this was how Pix interpreted them, and she prided herself on knowing her dogs' moods.

  “Look at Dusty and Henry. They're al confused. People aren't supposed to dig like this." Dirt was flying out behind her as she dug deeper. "You pul while I dig.”

  Samantha gave a yank and a large chunk of earth flew up, revealing more of the quilt. And as it unfolded, something else was exposed.

  That something else was a human hand.

  Two

  At first, Pix thought it was one of those plastic joke hands that had been al the rage in Maine the previous summer—sticking out of someone's trunk or trash can. The first time she'd seen one, she'd laughed. After a while, it got boring—and ghoulish.

  This hand wasn't plastic.

  Pix and Samantha looked at each other, aghast.

  Samantha was the first to speak.

  “It's a dead body, isn't it?" she whispered. Her face looked pale and sickly.

  Pix gently lifted the hand with the stick. It was flaccid and curiously heavy. The cuff of a blue denim work shirt was revealed. Pix assumed there was an arm attached, leading to al the other parts wrapped in the quilt in the shal ow grave. She nodded and stood up. Her legs were shaking.

  “I'l stay here and you go to the Hamiltons' for help.

  They're the closest. Take the dogs."

  “No, Mom. Keep the dogs with you."

  “Al right," Pix agreed. The dogs could slow Samantha down if they decided to chase a squirrel or even a leaf blowing across the path. She felt immeasurably comforted to have them stay.

  The two women climbed out of the hole in the ground at the lower end, opposite the spot where the body had been buried. As they walked across the level dirt, Pix gave a thought to the footprints they were obliterating, but there was nothing they could do about it now. From the moment the dog had jumped in, the murder scene had been messed up.

  Murder scene. Murder. There couldn't be any doubt.

  This was not the way loved ones were laid to rest.

  Samantha paused briefly to give her mother a hard hug. "Is this real y happening?”

  Pix held her close. "I'm afraid so, but I can't believe it, either. You'd better go," she said, holding her tighter.

  Samantha broke away and ran off toward the road.

  She was a fine athlete, and as her mother watched her graceful long-legged stride, the horrible discovery they had just made was forgotten for an instant—but only an instant.

  The first thing Pix did was to tie the dogs to one of the trees. She didn't want Artie or the others to continue the exhumation. She sat down on a granite boulder, a massive one disgorged by the inexorable progress of the glacier, and tried to th
ink.

  But the horror of their discovery was making rational thought impossible. At least she'd been able to send Samantha for help. What was fil ing her mind now was the picture of that hand lying on the ground, disembodied. It was growing larger and larger in her imagination. She hadn't even noticed whether it was the right or left, and what did that matter anyway? What mattered was that it was a person, someone who had been alive perhaps only a day or two ago. She took a tissue from her shirt pocket, blew her nose, and swal owed hard. She sat up straighter. So far, she'd done what she was supposed to; now she had to force herself to think of something besides that hand.

  For instance, whose it might be? She hadn't heard anyone was missing on the island, and her mother would certainly have mentioned it the night before. If it wasn't someone local, the police were going to have a difficult time identifying the remains. The end of the Point was a lonely, sheltered spot. A boat from anywhere along the Maine coast—or the Eastern Seaboard, for that matter—

  could easily land and dispose of a body without anyone knowing.

  But ... Her thoughts were sliding back into their old, familiar logical patterns. The kil er had to be someone who knew about the construction, someone who knew the foundation hadn't been poured yet. It was too unlikely that an individual looking to get rid of a dead body would just happen upon an excavation site. No, the whole thing did not point toward someone wel acquainted with what was happening on Sanpere. Roughly 95 percent of the population.

  The initial shock and disbelief were beginning to wear off and Pix was drawn to the edge of the basement, above the body. She looked down. The hand was dead white against the dark soil, just as she'd left it. She hadn’t imagined the whole thing and natural y nothing had moved.

  She jumped into the hole again, being careful to land on the same spot and retrace her steps. Somehow, Pix couldn't continue to sit on a rock with a corpse lying a few feet away and not investigate further.

  She didn't disturb anything; she simply stared at what had already been revealed and noticed several things she had missed before. There was a noticeable but smal X

  sewn in blue thread near the border of the quilt where people sometimes put a name and date. Roman numerals? The beginning of a date? X was ten. She remembered that much from her year of Latin.

  The hand looked like a man's—or that of a hirsute woman who worked with her hands. The nails were short, uneven, and one was blackened—the way a nail gets if you close it in a door or hit it with a hammer. It was the left hand, but there was no ring on the ring finger, although that didn't mean whoever it was wasn't married. Few of the men around here wore wedding bands, except to please their wives when they dressed up. The kind of work they did was not kind to jewelry.

  The final thing she noticed sent her quickly up aboveground. The quilt was indeed a red-and-white one, but there were two reds, one a slightly rusty one—dried blood. It had been a violent death.

  Back on the rock with the dogs stretched out next to her, she realized she could be here a long time. It would take Samantha at least a half hour to get to the Hamiltons'

  house at the beginning of the Point. Nan would be in church and probably not home yet. It was Sunday, so Freeman Hamilton wouldn't be out pul ing his lobster pots, and Pix hoped he was puttering around the house and not off someplace. He wouldn't go too far, though, and risk being late for his Sunday dinner.

  Freeman wasn't a churchgoer. Said he liked to talk to God directly. She remembered what he'd told her once when she was a girl and he and Nan were a young married couple. He'd come by with some lobsters for her grandfather, pointed to the view of their cove, with islands that seemed to stretch beyond the horizon across the wide expanse of deep blue water, and said, "You know, if you want to speak to God, it's a local cal from here”

  Pix thought a few words with the Almighty were most certainly in order now, but her mind was teeming with so many questions, such as how long the body had been there, that she settled for a few devout entreaties for the peaceful repose of whoever the unfortunate soul might be and a Godspeed for Samantha.

  Pix realized that she felt oddly distanced from the event. Was she in shock? Or was it because the hand stil seemed like plastic and without a ful y identified being, the death wasn't a reality yet? Nothing had been personalized, except their reactions to the idea of murder.

  She must be in shock, she thought, to be thinking this way and to be thinking about what she was thinking so consciously. She was going in circles, but she wasn't frightened. Whoever had brought the body here was long gone. She tried to imagine what might have happened. An unknown man (presumably) was stabbed to death by person or persons unknown, wrapped in a quilt (why a quilt?), taken to this out-of-the-way spot either by boat or car, and buried. It would have had to have been at night. It would have been risky to come during the day, when there was a chance the construction workers might be around.

  She saw the .scene vividly: the body wrapped in the quilt to keep the blood from leaving any tel -tale signs, carried from the car or boat, and placed in the basement; the digging of the grave by the dim light of a flashlight beam—make haste; make haste—final y leaving the corpse and slipping back into the role or roles played everyday, with no hint of the night's work crossing a face. Her breath was almost taken away at the audacity of it al . If Pix hadn't brought the dogs, the concrete basement floor would have covered the grave and no one would have been the wiser. The Fairchilds would be living above a crime and never know it.

  But wouldn't the dead person have been missed eventual y? What kind of person has no one asking his whereabouts?

  Pix stood up and walked farther away from the house.

  Sketching the scene in her mind had removed some of the distance—or the shock was wearing off. She began to feel queasy and afraid. Where was Samantha?

  Think about something else. There's nothing you can do. Why had she stayed behind? They both could have gone for help. But it had seemed wrong to leave that hand so exposed, untended. The sky was fil ed with the shril cries of gul s and terns. She shuddered at the notion of their beaks pecking at the hand, unearthing more of the body in the basement.

  She threw her head back and gazed up at the circling birds: herring gul s; laughing gul s; two cormorants, portentous black creatures, necks bent like shepherds'

  crooks as they landed on the rocks; arctic terns, streamlined and elegant, swooping graceful y among their gul cousins. She watched as one lone tern hovered over the water, then suddenly plunged headfirst after a fish. A hundred years ago, this tern would have been prey, not predator. Pix's mother invariably mentioned it at least once a season when watching the birds dart and dive.

  Thousands at a time were kil ed in their summer nesting grounds and island women were hired to skin them, preparing them for the New York feather market to grace a hat or trim a dress. The terns were saved from extinction just in the nick of time by the first Audubon Societies and legislation control ing the plumage trade.

  The terns were summer people. They were from

  "away" and had nested on the islands at their own peril.

  The corpse lying here under the sky, was it someone from away, as wel ? Someone unknown and unfamiliar to the island who could vanish without a trace? Vanish as the terns nearly had?

  Samantha must surely be at the Hamiltons' house by now.

  Think of other things.

  It was almost July, but the long hard winter buffeting the island with snow and heavy rains until late April had delayed the already-short growing season even further. And now it was dry. There wouldn't be the traditional fresh peas to go with salmon for the Fourth of July. No one had been able to sow much of anything Memorial Day weekend because the weather had been so bad. Pix imagined what her garden would look like in August: green tomatoes that she'd have to bring back to Aleford to ripen between sheets of newspaper; lettuce; too many zucchini; the eggplant was doubtful—Her pessimistic reverie was interrupted by a loud shout.

&
nbsp; “What the hel are you doing here!”

  She hadn't heard anyone approach, and it was obviously not Freeman Hamilton, Samantha, or Sergeant Dickinson.

  She jumped to her feet and ran in the direction of the shore, with some notion of trying to attract attention from a passing sailboat.

  The tethered dogs were barking their heads off. As she raced down the slope toward the beach, her heart pounding with fear and from the exertion, she glanced back at the animals and caught sight of the intruder. It was Seth Marshal , glowering. His long dark hair, heavy mustache, and the anger in his eyes made him look like a pirate from a children's book il ustration.

  Pix stopped abruptly and turned around. Her own anger of an hour ago returned ful force, fueled in addition by the fright he had given her.

  “What do you mean what am I doing here? How about what the hel you were supposed to be doing here? I thought you were building a house. The foundation isn't even poured!”

  Her voice was booming and she was almost face-to-face with him before she col ected herself. Seth Marshal knew when and where the concrete foundation was going to be poured. Seth Marshal had a handy pickup fil ed with shovels and al sorts of other digging equipment. Seth Marshal 's mother was a quilter.

  “I didn't know it was you." He was almost apologizing.

  "Don't want people messing around out here.”

  “When were you here last?" She wanted some information before she broke the news.

  “Look, Pix, I can't afford to turn work down. I told the Fairchilds that when they hired me. I've got to make enough in the spring and summer to last me al year. The Athertons needed some repairs at the camp before they could open and I've been over there the last few weeks. And I've been finishing a cottage for some people on the reach road. But we'l be here every daylight hour from now on. The soil is good and dry. We'l be able to get everything done, even the floor, by the end of the week. The Fairchilds wil have their place before Labor Day. That's a promise.”