by Susan Dunlap
Fifteen minutes later I drove through Henderson and up past the nursery to Half Hill Road. The area looked exactly as it had when I left about two hours ago. There were no vehicles parked either in front of the Davidsons’ or the McElveys’. Surely if he were home, Ward McElvey would have parked in front. He wouldn’t drag his city prospects up the hill and through the neighbor’s back yard.
I looked more closely at his house. The windows were shut. It was now four o’clock, traditionally the hottest hour of the day, and it had to be over one hundred degrees. The normal temperature was fifteen to twenty degrees cooler, with the Pacific breeze keeping things tolerable, and the redwoods and eucalyptus shading the roofs. But even they were no match for today’s heat. No one would be home with their windows shut.
I pulled the truck up next to the sewer hole and made my way around it. Even though there was no sewage in it, nothing to distinguish it from any other fifteen-foot hole, I, like everyone else in town, gave it a wide berth, not really believing there was no raw sewage in there waiting to foul the feet of the unwary.
Once on Michelle’s deck, I knocked before using the key. But no one was home here either. I went directly to the bedroom and found the picture in Michelle’s album. In it, she stood, eight years ago, looking up at a tall young man with sandy hair. He held the picket sign. The sign was at an angle to the camera and the words were unclear. But what needed no interpretation was the adoration in Michelle’s eyes.
I looked closely at Ross. His charm wasn’t immediately apparent. But I could see the intensity Alison had described. He was tall and very thin. There was a space between his front teeth that made him look a little younger and more vulnerable. His hair was a bit curly, a bit long, a bit uncared for, as if he had no time for such inessentials. But as he looked toward the sign, his eyes were piercing. He held it with both hands, his arms stretched away from his body like he was making a religious offering. And yet there was something in his relation to the sign that focused the viewer’s attention not on it but back to him. Michelle stared at him; the sign reflected him. He was the center of the snapshot.
But with the picture in front of me, I couldn’t be sure this was the man I had seen next door earlier. It was, after all, eight years old. The man leaning on the railing next door might well have been Ross. Eight years was plenty of time for his unsavory San Francisco associates to forget about him. As Alison had said, he would have no fear of coming back here now.
I looked at the picture again, but by now my recollection of the man next door had become blurred. The more I tried to bring it into focus the faster it faded, until I couldn’t recall a single feature clearly.
Michelle and Craig’s closet was also as it had been two hours ago—jammed. Nothing had been removed. Did that mean Ross had not come for clothes but for something else? Household money perhaps? Or maybe he had had second thoughts and not come in at all. Or maybe he wasn’t Ross.
I sank down on the bed. In the heat of the afternoon it was very appealing. Was there anything to do but wait for Ward McElvey to come home? And when he did, would he remember having seen the man on his porch? Would he know if he was Ross? But even if he was Ross, that didn’t mean he was having an affair with Michelle.
The sensible thing to do would be to lock the house and drive home to salvage the rest of the day. I could call Vida when she got off work and tell her… No. As long as it wasn’t definite, I would hold off telling Vida my suspicions.
There was one more person to talk to—Father Calloway. He had dropped Michelle downtown last night. She told him she was getting out to catch up with a man she knew. Surely he had looked to see who it was. Father Calloway had been the priest at St. Agnes’ for years. If Ross were Catholic he would have known him; if not, he might still have some memory of him, particularly if I could jog that memory with Ross’s picture.
Holding the picture by the edges, I pulled the front door shut and hurriedly started down the stairs. What time did priests eat dinner? Five? Five-thirty? If I drove fast, I might be able to catch Father Calloway before—
I stepped on the ivy. My foot slipped. I grabbed for the railing. It was too late. Both feet were in the air. I landed hard on my bottom and bounced down to the step below.
“Damn!”
My shoulder ached; I wriggled my bottom to see if it was still in one piece. Then I felt my jeans for rips. They too were whole. But that ameliorated the situation only slightly. It wasn’t till I looked up that I realized I had let go of the photo. I eyed the stairs, the ivy, and the road; I spotted it just as a breeze carried it into the sewer hole.
“Damn! Damn!” Somehow, the picture falling into the sewer hole pretty well summed up my day.
I dusted off my jeans, rubbed my bruised bottom, and walked down the steps to the hole.
Through the cracks between the boards I could see only darkness. There was nothing to do but shift the boards. I grabbed the edge of one, pulled it up, and flipped it over onto the road.
I looked back into the hole and choked off a scream.
At the bottom of the hole, next to the end of the sewer pipe, was Michelle Davidson. She lay on her back, her arms at her sides. Her brown eyes were open wide, but weren’t looking. A spray of dirt had landed on her face and in her open eyes. There was no question that she was dead.
I called the Sheriff’s Department from Michelle’s house, then walked back outside and down the steps slowly, and sat, still shaking, as two deputies pulled up and walked to the hole. I answered the questions one of them asked.
Sheriff Wescott arrived, and then the department photographer, the ambulance, and the doctor. Neighbors began to emerge from their houses and formed a group at the far side of the street. The McElveys were not among them. I recognized only faces; I couldn’t have put names to any of them.
The sheriff’s contingent seemed to talk among themselves for a long time. I could hear words but I made no attempt to put them into sentences. One of the neighbors walked away and returned with a ladder, and first one of the ambulance men, and then the sheriff, climbed down into the sewer hole. The others stared over the edge.
I pushed myself up and walked toward the sewer hole. The neighbors had stayed back. None of the deputies seemed to notice me. They were all looking down.
A light covering of dirt overlaid Michelle’s body, as if a mourner had thrown in a traditional handful after the graveside service. But Michelle looked like a parody of the traditional corpse. Her arms lay near her sides and her legs were straight but flung apart, as if her torso and arms had hit the damp earth in the hole and stuck but her legs had been jerked up by the force of her fall and came down apart. Her long brown hair was wet and hung limply. Her face was a sallow gray-green; it looked more like a mask than something that had recently been alive.
The sheriff climbed back up. Another ambulance crew member lowered the stretcher down and then climbed in after it.
I didn’t need to see Michelle’s body belted onto it and lifted out. I didn’t want to see the dirt that had been sprinkled over her face and stuck to her eyes. I wanted to sit on the steps with a very strong drink. Instead, I took a breath and walked up to Sheriff Wescott. Michelle’s murder was his business now. I said, “I spent some time checking into where Michelle was last night.”
As he turned to me his tanned brown face wrinkled; the corners of his mouth moved but I couldn’t tell whether he had instinctively started to smile as he recognized me, or grimace in recollection of the murder investigation I had been involved with in March. There were things I hadn’t told him then, things I could never admit. He suspected that then and it had added an edge to our encounters. He ran a hand through his curly brown hair. “Does no one die in this town without your attention?”
Ignoring that, I said, “Michelle had a boyfriend in high school, a guy who was older than she was. People speculate that she was still fascinated by him even though he hasn’t lived here in years. His name was Ross Remson.”
Out of
the side of my eye I could see the ambulance crew lifting Michelle’s body out of the sewer hole. I swallowed.
Wescott had turned to watch them. To me he said, “So?”
“I’m just trying to pass on what I know to make your murder investigation a little easier.”
“Murder?” he said, drawing his attention back to me. “What makes you think this is murder? A woman comes home from a bar, falls into a fifteen-foot hole and hits her head on the end of a sewer pipe, and you instantly suspect murder.”
I stood staring at the hole a moment. It hadn’t occurred to me that he could assume otherwise. I started to protest, then caught myself. Why was it I suspected Michelle had been murdered? Was it just because I had been checking on her disappearance? Was it because I assumed she had been with Ross (Ross who lots of people viewed with suspicion)? So now I assumed Ross had killed Michelle? Was that all? Was Sheriff Wescott correct in saying that I instantly suspected murder?
But no. There was more. There was something about Michelle’s body.
“You don’t fall down a hole like this backwards,” I said. “We’re all familiar with the sewer hole. We give it a wide berth automatically, as if it were already filled with sewage. I’ve caught myself doing that. I’ve seen other people. No one strolls right next to it as if it were a pothole.”
“So?” He glared down at the hole. Beyond it one of the deputies was driving off.
“So Michelle wouldn’t be casually standing at the edge and step back by mistake.”
“Look, you told the deputy that she came home from a bar. You don’t know what time she got here. She was probably drunk. Half the Russian River area is drunk. If we didn’t have drunks driving into trees, getting into fights, falling down flights of stairs, or wading out into the river until they forget where they are and drown, we wouldn’t need two-thirds of the sheriffs here.”
“You don’t know she was drunk.”
“We’ll find out. The lab will tell us.” He took a step toward his car.
“When?” I demanded.
“As soon as they can,” he snapped. “It’s a busy time for them. It’s not just the merchants who do a big business when the Bohemians are here. The lab’s got plenty of samples to analyze and they’ll have lots more as soon as the festivities get going proper.”
“So the question of whether Michelle Davidson was murdered is going to sit on the back burner?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“You didn’t say anything definite.”
He took another step and then swiveled back to face me. “Is there something conclusive, some piece of evidence that you want to tell me about? You’re good at concealing evidence, I know that. Now if there’s something that’s made you decide this is murder, tell me.”
I had seen his face harden like this before. It had the leathery look of suntan and of disgust. His blue eyes looked icy. There might be more behind that expression, but it was impossible for me to say what it was.
“Michelle was a gymnast. She had good balance. She knew how to move. Even if she had been drinking she’d still have better reactions than you or I. She wouldn’t fall flat on her back like that. She would roll instinctively.”
“Everyone has off days.”
“Then what about the boards. The boards that covered the sewer hole were too close together for her to have fallen between them—particularly backwards.”
He glanced at the hole. “One board wasn’t even on it.”
“I know. I moved it.”
“You what?”
“Well, I needed to see down there. I wasn’t looking for a body—” I caught myself before admitting I was looking for Ross’s picture. “I explained all this to your deputy.”
“How close were the boards then?”
I held my hands about a foot apart.
“That’s what you remember now?” he asked.
“Give or take.”
“Uh-huh. ‘Give or take.’ Six inches Or twelve or fifteen. She was a small woman. She could have fallen through.”
“No, she couldn’t have.”
He shook his head. “I have only your very inexact recollection for that. I can’t base an investigation on that, not this week.”
“You can’t just let this go so you can have more men patrolling the streets. Michelle Davidson had a family. It will make a big difference to them whether she came home so drunk that she fell into a sewer and died, or whether she was murdered. If you leave them with that question, it’s like sticking her body in their living room until you’re ready to deal with it.”
Under his suntan his face flushed with anger. “I said I’ll handle this investigation. That’s what I do. That’s why I’m a sheriff and you are a meter reader. So leave it alone, okay?”
“Are you through with me then?” I said, matching the anger in his voice.
“I just want you to tell me that you’re going to stay out of this.”
But that was the one thing I couldn’t do.
I sat in the cab of my pickup and watched Sheriff Wescott drive back toward town.
I hadn’t realized till I blurted it out to the sheriff how undignified Michelle Davidson’s death was. In life she had been the pompom leader, the prom queen. Once it became known she died from a drunken fall into a sewer that would be all people would remember. If people did think beyond that epitaph, they would add that she got that drunk with a man. There would be plenty of speculation about that.
Would this occur to the sheriff? I doubted it. Sheriff Wescott was a decent man. I knew he was competent and fair, and would do the best he could. But even the most conscientious lawman couldn’t do everything at this time of the year. He himself had said the Sheriff’s Department was wildly overworked during Bohemian Week. Besides the drunk driving, there were the confrontations that came when the mighty and the servants thereof strolled into town expecting special consideration. There might not be many, but one or two was all the Sheriff’s Department needed. When they ran afoul of the local people who were barely scratching out a living legally, or making ends meet by forays into the not-so-legal, there was little tolerance on either side. The Russian River area had its share of mountain men who were no respecters of chairmen of the board or assistants to chairmen. And there were the tourist families and gays. With the festival atmosphere in town and the river of beer that accompanied it, there was a big potential for violence. It was much too great a potential to leave the sheriff time to investigate something that looked like an accidental death.
Still, it was possible that Sheriff Wescott might come around to thinking Michelle’s death was murder. But he wouldn’t do that until after the lab report came back, and that might be days. By that time Ross would be gone. He would be out of town, out of state, or even out of the country.
Right now the sheriff would be heading for the nursery to tell Craig Davidson his wife was dead. What I had to do was find Ross. But first I had to see Father Calloway. For him to identify the man Michelle had met last night he would need to see Ross’s picture. And that was still down in the sewer hole.
I climbed out of my truck and reluctantly walked back to the hole. I scanned the edges of it, hoping that somehow the photo had got stuck within reaching distance. It hadn’t.
There was nothing to do but climb down. That meant crossing the sheriff’s cordon. It also meant getting a ladder out of the garage.
I tried the garage door. Not surprisingly, it was locked. Only those who wished to let their belongings circulate left garages unlocked. But there was a window on the side by the staircase. It was open, probably to air out the smell of the cesspool runoff and the mosquito larvae. I hesitated only briefly. If I were seen crossing the sheriff’s cordon and climbing into the sewer, being spotted breaking into the garage wouldn’t make things much worse.
Hoisting myself through the window was no problem. Once inside, I found an extension ladder hanging on hooks on the far wall, right above the slimy patch. The garage door pushed up easi
ly, and in a minute I was back outside.
I lowered the ladder into the hole and, without looking to see who might be watching, climbed down.
It was dark in the hole. Tomblike. My eyes adjusted slowly. It made me shiver to realize that this had been Michelle’s tomb. It was also wetter than I had expected. Half Hill Road is partway up the hill. Even a fifteen-foot hole wouldn’t be below water level. But there are springs, and the ground holds water from the winter rains. For whatever reason, the bottom of the hole was squishy with mud. Gingerly I put a foot down, still hanging onto the ladder.
The place where Michelle’s body had landed, next to the end of the sewer pipe, was a mound of earth higher than the surrounding areas. On either side of the pipe was a shallow ditch. It was in one of these that I stood, now ankle-deep in mud. I turned, forcing myself to survey the near wall of the hole foot by foot, looking for the picture. But it had not stuck to that wall.
I took three careful steps, positioning myself in front of the wall opposite the end of the pipe. It was a bit better lighted and it took me less time to conclude the photo wasn’t there either.
The far wall was also bare. I turned back around. The mud was cold and had splattered my jeans. I glanced at the mound of dirt, sure the picture would not still be lying on it. Had it landed there the sheriff would have spotted it and taken it out with the body.
But it had to be in this hole. I had seen it go in. Now I looked at the pipe, in the pipe as best I could, and beneath the sides of it. And there, stuck under the pipe, was the photo. My hands were muddy. I picked up the photo by the edges and started up the ladder, moving carefully, afraid of dropping it back into the hole.
The sunlight hit me all at once. I closed my eyes against it and felt its warmth on my cheek. Turning away from the light, I opened my eyes and climbed the rest of the way up the ladder. It wasn’t till I was about to step out that I saw Craig Davidson staring down at me.