their sight, and Emily presumed that the two of them would be sleeping tonight with Chip and her in the queen- size bed in the master bedroom.
“The mobile crime lab will search for any remaining bones and probably nose around the basement- especially behind that door-for anything that might have been a murder weapon. Even a big rock,” she said.
“This house seems to be filled with them,” Emily observed.
The trooper smiled at the small, dark joke and said, “I guess you mean murder weapons and not big rocks.”
“Yes.”
“You want to be more specific?”
Emily looked at Chip to see if he wanted to answer, but he remained silent. And so she described the crowbar, the knife, and the ax.
“And you really found them hidden around the house?” the trooper asked.
“We did.”
“Well, be sure to give them to the investigators tomorrow. And I know you’ve probably handled them a bunch, but try not to handle them anymore. Okay?”
“No problem there.”
“That Tansy Dunmore was quite a piece of work.”
“That’s what I hear,” Emily agreed.
The trooper turned to Chip. “So, you took down that door,” she said.
“I did.”
“Why?”
He shrugged and smiled. “Same reason men climb mountains, I guess. Because it was there.”
“And you never found any bones in the dirt on the other side?”
“I did not.”
“Okay.” Then she peered through the doorway into the living room at the twins. “Really, there’s nothing more to be scared of,” she told the girls. “It’s just a skull. We all have one. You’re not in any danger.”
Her daughters were staring at the woman, their faces a little blank. Emily couldn’t imagine what they were thinking. “Whose body was buried down there?” she asked, lowering her voice, though she feared that her girls could still hear her. “Do you have any idea at all?”
“My guess? And it’s just a guess from growing up around here. But I’d say it was Sawyer Dunmore. We’ll see if there are any open homicides or missing persons going back a long while. But my money would be on Sawyer. He killed himself years and years ago, and became the sort of ghost story we’d all tell each other at sleepover parties and Girl Scout campouts.”
“You were a Girl Scout?” Emily asked.
The trooper grinned a little sheepishly. “I guess I’ve always liked uniforms.”
“I was, too.”
“There you go,” she said. “You probably had your share of ghost stories founded on nothing.”
“Well,” Emily said, “this was something.”
“Yes and no. I mean, it’s real and it’s scary. But it’s all explicable. Everything you’re going through is explicable and, soon enough, will be behind you.”
“Tell me more about ‘explicable.’ I want my daughters to get a few hours of sleep tonight. I want to get a few hours of sleep tonight.”
“Sawyer’s parents were, I gather, a little… off. Especially his mother. And when Sawyer killed himself, she really lost it. At least that’s what people say. I mean, it must be awful to lose a child like that. Just awful. I know I would have been willing to cut her a bunch of slack. Know what I mean?”
Emily thought about the weapons she had found in the house. She thought about the paranoia the woman had been enduring at the end of her life. “Go on,” she said.
“We all used to try and scare each other by saying that Sawyer wasn’t really buried in the cemetery. We used to go on and on with stories straight out of Psycho. You know the movie, right?”
Emily nodded. “Absolutely.”
“We’d tell ourselves that Tansy and Parnell had kept their son’s body around the house. They’d talk to it, dress it up. But his actual death was before my time, and we didn’t really believe it. Not a word. After all, his twin brother had grown up in that house, too, and when I was a kid he was an adult living not all that far from here. St. Johnsbury, I think.”
“Yes,” Emily said. “It is St. Johnsbury.”
“Anyway, it seems that maybe they really did bury their boy right downstairs. Built a little vault. But the Major Crime Unit and the medical examiner will look at what we have here. They’ll make sure the skull and whatever bones are down there really are Sawyer Dunmore’s. Dental records, most likely. If that doesn’t work, then DNA. As you said, the brother still lives in St. Johnsbury. I just guess, Mr. Linton, you hacked your way into a personal crypt.”
“But wouldn’t Hewitt Dunmore have told us there was a body buried in the basement of the house?” Emily asked. “Wouldn’t he want the grave respected?”
“I don’t know. I’m not even sure it’s legal. And, somehow, I don’t think leaving a corpse in the cellar does a whole lot for a property’s resale value,” the trooper said, and she actually chuckled just the tiniest bit as she started walking toward the front hallway. She paused for a moment and waved at the girls. “You’ll be okay,” she told them, and she sounded a bit like an older sister. “You’ll be just fine.”
As they were saying good-bye, the porch light caught the badge with the woman’s name, and it sparkled. “Tell me,” Emily said, “What does the C stand for?”
The trooper looked her straight in the eye and said-just a hint of a smile on her lips-“Celandine. It’s an herb.” Then she turned and marched down the slate walkway to her cruiser.
Chapter Twelve
Again today the girls are not going to school. Not after last night. But you’re not worried, they’re smart. They’ll catch up. Instead Emily has taken them shopping in Hanover and West Lebanon for the day. Anything to get them out of the house. She didn’t want them here when the state troopers from the Major Crime Unit appeared, and she didn’t want them present when this new psychiatrist makes her house call.
The Major Crime Unit came first, soon after the girls left, and you found that you rather enjoyed giving the four investigators in their crisp uniforms a tour. The men were roughly your age, and you took pleasure in showing them the door in the basement you destroyed and that strange back stairway between the kitchen and the second floor. You shared with them your work spackling and sanding and painting, and you showed them the new wallpaper you have started to drape upon the walls. You moved carefully because of your stomach, but it was only when you twisted your torso in that back stairway that you felt a real spike of pain-and even that was rather minor compared to the agonies you experience when Ethan or Ashley or Sandra is present. For a time you sat on the basement steps and watched as they dug and sifted through the dirt in the chamber. You were there when they exhumed more of the skeleton and when they found the small brown medicine bottle-uncorked, empty, and perhaps three inches long. It’s just like the one with the homemade pain reliever John gave you. They took that old bottle with them, as well as the bones they unearthed and what they presumed were remnants of clothing. They placed in Ziploc bags the skull and the jawbone that Garnet dug up last night. They labeled and brought to their van the crowbar and the ax that Tansy Dunmore left for you. But they did not leave with either the bones you found or Tansy’s knife. They did not know to ask about those other bones, and you did not volunteer the information that they existed and were stored at that moment in your bedroom armoire. And the knife? It must have gotten lost when you were brought to the emergency room. At least that’s what you told them. The last time you saw the knife was here in the kitchen, you explained. You worked with the troopers to search the kitchen and your car and the basement. You suggested that, perhaps, it had wound up in Emily’s station wagon, because that was the car your wife had driven when she followed the ambulance to the emergency room. You told the troopers you would be sure to look there when she and the twins returned later that day. And then they left, the van
