They separated. Hank went to the back door, his heart thudding heavily in his chest. He had to fumble twice to thread the locking arm through the hasp. This close to the house, the smell of age and wood rot was palpable. All those stories about Hubie Marsten that they had laughed about as kids began to recur, and the chant they had chased the girls with:
‘Hank?’
He drew in breath sharply, and the other lock dropped out of his hands. He picked it up. ‘You oughtta know better than to creep up on a person like that, Did you…?’
‘Yeah. Hank, who’s gonna go down in that cellar again and put the key ring on the table?’
‘I dunno,’ Hank Peters said. ‘I dunno.’
‘Think we better flip for it?’
‘Yeah, I guess that’s best.’
Royal took out a quarter. ‘Call it in the air.’ He flicked it.
‘Heads.’
Royal caught it, slapped it on his forearm, and exposed it. The eagle gleamed at them dully.
‘Jesus,’ Hank said miserably. But he took the key ring and the flashlight and opened the bulkhead doors again.
He forced his legs to carry him down the steps, and when he had cleared the roof overhang he shone his light across the visible cellar, which took an L-turn thirty feet further up and went off God knew where. The flashlight beam picked out the table, with a dusty checked tablecloth on it. A rat sat on the table, a huge one, and it did not move when the beam of light struck it. It sat up on its plump haunches and almost seemed to grin.
He walked past the box toward the table. ‘Hsst! Rat!’
The rat jumped down and trotted off toward the elbow-bend further up. Hank’s hand was trembling now, and the flashlight beam slipped jerkily from place to place, now picking out a dusty barrel, now a decades-old bureau that had been loaded down here, now a stack of old newspapers, now -
He jerked the flashlight beam back toward the newspapers and sucked in breath as the light fell on something to the left side of them.
A shirt… was that a shirt? Bundled up like an old rag. Something behind it that might have been blue jeans. And something that looked like…
Something snapped behind him.
He panicked, threw the keys wildly on the table, and turned away, shambling into a run. As he passed the box, he saw what had made the noise. One of the aluminum bands had let go, and now pointed jaggedly toward the low roof, like a finger.
He stumbled up the stairs, slammed the bulkhead behind him (his whole body had crawled into goose flesh; he would not be aware of it until later), snapped the lock on the catch, and ran to the cab of the truck. He was breathing in small, whistling gasps like a hurt dog. He dimly heard Royal asking him what had happened, what was going on down there, and then he threw the truck into drive and screamed out, roaring around the corner of the house on two wheels, digging at the soft earth. He did not slow down until the truck was back on the Brooks Road, speeding toward Lawrence Crockett’s office in town. And then he began to shake so badly he was afraid he would have to pull over.
‘What was down there?’ Royal asked. ‘What did you see?’
‘Nothin’,’ Hank Peters said, and the word came out in sections divided by his clicking teeth. ‘I didn’t see nothin’ and I never want to see it again.’
6
Larry Crockett was getting ready to shut up shop and go home when there was a perfunctory tap on the door and Hank Peters stepped back in. He still looked scared.
‘Forget somethin’, Hank?’ Larry asked. When they had come back from the Marsten House, both looking like somebody had given their nuts a healthy tweak, he had given them each an extra ten dollars and two six-packs of Black Label and had allowed as how maybe it would be best if none of them said too much about the evening’s outing.
‘I got to tell you,’ Hank said now. ‘I can’t help it, Larry. I got to.’
‘Sure you do,’ Larry said. He opened the bottom desk drawer, took out a bottle of Johnnie Walker, and poured them each a knock in a couple of Dixie cups. ‘What’s on your mind?’
Hank took a mouthful, grimaced, and swallowed it.
‘When I took those keys down to put ‘em on the table, I seen something. Clothes, it looked like. A shirt and maybe some dungarees. And a sneaker. I think it was a sneaker, Larry.’
Larry shrugged and smiled. ‘So?’ It seemed to him that a large lump of ice was resting in his chest.
‘That little Glick boy was wearin’ jeans. That’s what it said in the
Larry kept smiling. The smile felt frozen on.
Hank gulped convulsively. ‘What if those guys that bought the Marsten House and that store blew up the Glick kid?’ There. It was out. He swallowed the rest of the liquid fire in his cup.
Smiling, Larry said, ‘Maybe you saw a body, too.’
