cave in part of the right front fender; it had screwed up the steering gear somehow, so that that side felt loose on turns and shimmied badly at speeds above thirty-five. I didn’t like driving it this way, but at the moment I had no choice. I held my speed down and put blind trust in the thing hanging together for another sixty miles or so.
I drove straight down the coast on Highway 1, taking it very slow through the bad snaky stretch at Devil’s Slide. The weather had turned poor again-heavily overcast, gusty winds, mist sailing in ragged streamers along the edge of the sea. There was not much traffic. I kept my mind blank as I drove; I did not want to think about what lay ahead. Time enough for thinking when I finished what I was on my way to do.
When I got to Moss Beach it was a little after three. I turned inland through the village, went out Sunshine Valley Road, picked up Elm Street a little while later. And a little while after that I was again looking at the deserted expanse of the Martinez farm.
I parked where I had the first time, in the middle of the dusty yard, and got out in slow, careful movements. Driving hadn’t bothered me too much, except for the jouncing of the car as I crawled over the rutted access lane; that had made my side and my head hurt. My joints ached, too, as I stepped away from the car. Old, I thought. Old and badly used.
The wind blew hard and cold here, made pained moaning noises in the surrounding woods, fiapped a loose shutter at one of the house windows, spun a rowel on a rusty weathervane atop the barn; I was glad I had thought to put on the overcoat. I stood looking around for a time. Everything seemed as it had been nearly a week ago. But looks can be deceiving; I ought to have remembered that little homily before, saved myself a lot of grief. They might have been here in the interim, one or the other or both of them. It depended on how secure they felt… no, on how secure she felt.
Without thinking about where I was going I crossed to the house, climbed the porch stairs. Delaying tactic, but so what? The front door was still closed, as I had left it last Friday. I turned the knob and it opened and I went inside.
Nothing different about the front parlor; the dark-wood crucifix was still there on one wall. I moved through the kitchen, the dining area, the child’s room, into the bedroom Danny Martinez had shared with his common-law wife. Nothing different there either. The bronze, silver-trimmed crucifix still hung above the bed. And the photo of young, laughing Roberto Martinez was still wedged between the frame and the glass of the oval mirror.
Crucifixes.
Photographs.
Man packs up all his belongings, clothes and things, crap from the bathroom medicine cabinet, loads up his old pickup truck and clears out for Mexico-that’s the way it’s supposed to look. But he’s a religious man; why would he leave the crucifixes behind, particularly the one in here? Even if the break-up of his family had soured him on his faith, this crucifix was an expensive piece of craftsmanship and he had been a poor man all his life. No reason for him to leave it behind, none at all.
No reason for him not to have taken the photo of his son, either. You could understand a man not taking the other photo, the one of the three of them: he might not want to keep anything with the woman’s image on it. But two different people had told me Danny Martinez doted on Roberto. And the photograph there on the mirror was a fine one, little boy laughing, nobody in it but him-the kind of photo no loving father could bear to leave behind.
Photographs and crucifixes. And I was a damned poor detective for not having realized these things before.
Back through the house, down the stairs, over to the car. I leaned inside, unclipped the flashlight from under the dash. And then hesitated, feeling tired and sore and a little sick to my stomach. The wind slapped at me, and I shivered-but it was more than just the cold that put the tremor on my body. Get it over with, I thought. But it was another minute or so before I could make myself move toward the barn.
The one door was still open, canted at an angle on its weak hinges. I went through the opening. The sour odor was the same — or maybe it wasn’t, maybe it was stronger. I breathed through my mouth so I wouldn’t have to smell it. The shadows in the corners, under the hayloft, up around the eaves seemed denser today because of the heavy overcast outside. I switched on the flashlight and played its powerful beam over the stack of lumber, the carpentering tools scattered nearby. Then, slowly, I made my way toward the rear, to where the horse stalls were.
The second stack of lumber still stood in the one on the far left. I moved that way, put the light on the two- by-fours and sheets of plywood piled haphazardly along the back wall. Not much, really. Just enough to cover about a third of the packed-earth floor.
What was it doing here? That was the question I should have asked myself last Friday, just as I should have asked myself why the crucifixes and the photograph of Roberto were still in the house. Nothing back here but the otherwise empty stalls; nothing that needed repair; nothing that would warrant lugging two-by-fours and plywood sheets from the front of the barn all the way back here.
Only one reason for the lumber in this stall, then: to hide something underneath it.
I let the light slither over the bare earth. It was marked, chewed up here and there by shoes or boots, by pieces of lumber, maybe by a tool of some kind. Yeah. But the marks and gouges didn’t look fresh. Nor did the lumber seem to have been disturbed since my first visit. They hadn’t been back in here; that seemed certain.
I had no stomach for the rest of it, and I was afraid of the exertion. But I had to do it, I had to be sure. I wedged the flash into a crack in the boards separating the stall from its neighbor, positioning it so that it illuminated the lumber. There were three of the plywood sheets on top; I tackled those first, carried them out one at a time and dropped them back a ways. The two-by-fours were next: same thing, one at a time. The first few trips weren’t too bad, but then I lifted one of the pieces wrong, even though I was bending and lifting in slow motion. The pain cut through my side, made it difficult for me to breathe for a few seconds. Started my head aching again, too. I rested for a time, but the pain lingered and so did the shortness of breath. Live with it, I told myself, you’ve lived with worse. Don’t think about it. Don’t think about anything.
It took me more than twenty minutes to clear the stall, double the time it would have taken if I’d been healthy. Wrapped in the heavy overcoat, I was drenched in oily sweat by the time I finished; but I hadn’t dared take the coat off, not as cold as it was in here. My knees felt shaky and I had to sit down for a couple of minutes before I did anything else. But not there in the stall; not anywhere close to it. Not with the smell that came from the spaded-up earth under the last two sections of plywood.
There was an old three-legged kitchen stool near the workbench; I sat on that, breathing through my mouth, not thinking about anything. When my legs felt all right I got up again, found a shovel among the tools near the main stack of lumber, took it back to the stall. And began to dig.
The earth was soft, moist; the work would not have been hard except for the constant bending and straightening that aggravated each stiffened joint, worsened the pain in my side and the dull pounding in my head. During the next ten minutes I had to stop and rest three times. If the body had been down deep I might have had to give up the job altogether. But it wasn’t down deep; it was buried a little more than twelve inches below the surface.
The shovel blade bit into something yielding and the poisonous, gaseous stench of decay spurted up at me. I recoiled, gagging. When I turned back finally, reluctantly, I was looking at an arm — a man’s bloated arm, blackened fingers acrawl with bugs, bulging out of the remnants of a blue chambray shirt.
I had finally found Danny Martinez.
I could not have faced any more digging, even if it had been necessary; the stench was sickening enough as it was. Ben Klein on the phone last Friday: We didn’t even get a smell of this guy Martinez. Jesus Christ!
Shaking a little, I threw the shovel down and pulled the flashlight out of the crack in the boards. The beam slithered sideways, made something gleam in the mound of dirt I’d created-something red and shiny. I leaned over that way, trying not to gag again, and held the light on it up close.
Part of a fingernail, torn raggedly on one end: a woman’s long fingernail painted a bright crimson.
I left it where it was; no point in removing incriminating evidence. I had to get out of there. The stench was so bad it made me feel as if I were suffocating. I followed the light across the barn, shut it off when I got outside. Stood in the chill wind with my head back, sucking air until my chest cleared and the nausea was gone. Then I went to the car and got inside and started the engine and sat huddled and shivering, waiting for the heater to fill up the space with warm air. Thinking again. Remembering.
Elisabeth Summerhayes: I hate women who mark men, the ones with claws like cats. She had been talking about Alicia Purcell. But Mrs. Purcell had short fingernails now, short and painted a bright bloody crimson. Why
