There was still a piece of yellow crime scene tape tied to the trunk of a tree. Andrew jumped out and unlocked the gate. We drove in. The road hadn’t changed much in fifty years. It was still a narrow, gravel-covered lane cutting straight across a flat expanse of weeds and briars. For several hundred yards the ground sank ever lower. Then after a small brook it began to rise. The road wound through a series of knobby hills, finally ending in a small, gravel-covered parking lot.
We got out of the car. There wasn’t a house in sight. “You can see why the killer wasn’t afraid to shoot a gun out here, can’t you?” I said. “It would just be a faint pop in the distance, if anybody heard it at all.”
I didn’t mean for it to be a rhetorical question, but Andrew treated it like one. He put his hands in his coat pockets and started walking toward the path that led up the side of a grassy hill. I trotted like a penguin to catch up. I tried again. “And you wouldn’t have to worry about anybody else being around, would you?”
He didn’t answer that one either. He put his head down and started up the hill. I followed. It was a dirt path but the ground was still hard from the winter. In a week or two, once the temperature climbed a bit and the spring rains started in earnest, it would be a soupy mess. “Exactly where did you find him?”
Andrew stopped and pointed into the brown, foot-tall grass, just a few feet to his right. “Right there.”
“There?” I was expecting to find crime tape and footprints and ground stained purple with Gordon’s blood. But it was just grass, tall, dry and brown, nodding ever so slightly in the late winter wind. “So that Saturday you found him-did you see his body from the parking lot?”
“If I did, I didn’t realize it was a body. I mean, you don’t exactly expect to see a body, do you?”
Andrew was shaking. And it wasn’t from the cold. I knew that because I was shaking, too. “No, I guess you don’t.”
“I started up the path toward the dig site, just like we’re doing.” He pointed again at the grass. “And there he was.”
“Did you know right away it was Gordon?”
“He was face down. And the grass was kind of covering him. But I recognized his coat. He always wore this big denim barn coat.”
“I know the police have already put you through this-and I know this is hard-but did you try to revive him?”
He shook his head, almost violently. “There was no doubt he was dead, Mrs. Sprowls. There was a hole in the back of his head. His face was all red and green and bloated. His eyes were-”
I waved off any further description. “What did you do then?”
“I ran back to my car and threw up. Right on the door. Then I called 911.”
I scanned the parking lot below us. “There’s a pay phone out here?”
“Huh?”
I spotted the tiny leather case clipped to his belt and felt like a fool. I must be the only person alive who doesn’t carry a cell phone. “Never mind,” I said. “So did the police come right out?”
“A couple of sheriff’s deputies first. Then a bunch of cars from the Hannawa police.”
“I suppose they put you through the wringer.”
It was an old expression from an old woman and it took him a few seconds to figure out what I meant. “I’m sure they think I killed him.”
I pawed the air to let him know how ridiculous I thought that was. “I’m sure they even suspect me.”
His eyes were cloudy now. “I loved the old guy, Mrs. Sprowls.”
“Of course you did. We all did.” I patted his shoulder until the sadness was gone from his smile. “Now, Andrew,” I said, “what do you say we go see that dig site of yours.”
We continued up the hill.
It was not a real hill, the kind made by God, time and the rumpling of tectonic plates. It was the outer rim of the man-made basin dug to hold Hannawa’s garbage. The slope was smooth and even, like the wall of an ancient earthen fort. We were on top in only a minute.
The landfill stretched out to our left-a prairie-like expanse of tall grass sprinkled with scraggly shrubs and trees. I’m no judge of space, but I bet it covered twenty or thirty acres. We turned to the right, toward a line of shaggy pines. As we walked, Andrew told me how the landfill had been constructed. “Landfills are like big bathtubs,” he said. “The first thing engineers look for is a good hydrogeologic setting, a nice mass of unfractured bedrock that won’t leak into the groundwater. They dig out a big bowl and put in a bottom liner, sometimes clay, sometimes high-density polyethylene, sometimes both. This site unfortunately has just clay.”
As Andrew described the landfill, his entire demeanor changed, his voice and his eyes and the way he held his head. Maybe he was a goofy boy with blue hair on the outside, but inside resided a smart, serious, self-assured man. I could see why Gordon chose him over all those other candidates. “You really know your stuff,” I said.
The boy in him blushed. The man in him quickly recovered. “As the garbage is dumped, it’s covered with layers of clay, sand and gravel, and finally a layer of topsoil and grass-not just for aesthetic reasons, but to keep rainwater out. But of course water does get in, and picks up contaminates as it filters down. They call that contaminated water leachate. It’s collected at the bottom of the basin in pipes and pumped out.”
“It’s hard to believe there’s sixteen years of garbage bubbling away down there,” I said. “It all looks so tidy on top. So peaceful.”
My naivete made him smile. “Despite all the science, and all the care, all landfills fail to some degree. This one included. Liners crack. Pipes clog. Roots and animals drill holes through the cover soil. People get lazy. Budgets get cut. Too much water washes in. Too much leachate leaks into the surrounding environment.”
“Garbage in, garbage out?” I quipped.
“True enough,” he said. “But then where would we archaeologists be without garbage?”
We reached the shaggy pines. And Gordon’s dig site.
Just below the rim of the landfill was a dome-shaped mound, maybe 500 feet across. “That’s the old Wooster Pike dump? I don’t recognize it a bit.”
“That’s it,” Andrew said. “The old dump road you remember came along right where we’re standing now. When the city built the new landfill they left the old junk right where it was. Covered it with dirt and threw a little grass seed around. Then they dug the new landfill basin alongside.”
“They didn’t make any effort to clean up the old dump?”
“Nope. They just covered it over and forgot about it. Which is great for us. There’s a hundred years of wonderful old stuff under there. A real time capsule.”
We headed down the slope and waded into the tall grass atop the mound. It was knee deep, cold and nasty, choked with the rotting stems of last summer’s goldenrod. “Professor Sweet lobbied the city for three years to get permission to dig here,” Andrew said. “He finally got it in 1999. But it was a couple more years before the dig actually started.”
My foot hit something. I started to tumble. Andrew caught me. “Careful, Mrs. Sprowls. There’s a stake every ten feet.”
“Booby traps for nosy old women?”
“Grid posts for nosy archaeology students,” he said. He dropped to his knees and pulled the grass away from the offending stake. It was about a foot high. Square. Marked with faded black letters and numbers that made no sense to me.
“What’s that gibberish?” I asked.
“Coordinates. Archaeology is very precise. Where something is found is just as important as what’s found. So before you start digging, you mark off the site in a grid pattern. You establish perpendicular baselines running north to south and east to west. Then along those lines you stake out digging squares. You excavate square by square, carefully recording what you’ve found, in what condition, at what depth, in what environment. Carefully boxing up the stuff you want to keep for later study.”
We continued through the grass, Andrew high-stepping like a moose, me stepping very carefully, like a pink flamingo. “It would take forever to dig up the entire dump, wouldn’t it?”
“Just about,” Andrew said. “Professor Sweet only dug for twelve weeks over the summer-ten or fifteen students working in teams of two, each team hoping to finish one ten-foot block-so, yeah, it would take a while to excavate the entire site.”
We reached the center of the mound and started down the other side. I could see now the twenty squares or so that had already been excavated and then re-covered with dirt. Lumpy and weedy. “It looks like my vegetable
