“Who was?”
“Elijah Lank. I didn’t know his cousin Amalthea very well, because she was five years behind us in school-just a kid. But we all knew Elijah.” Her voice had dropped to nearly a whisper, as though she was reluctant to say the name aloud.
“How well did you know him?”
“As well as I needed to.”
“It doesn’t sound as if you liked him very much.”
Miss Clausen turned and looked at her. “It’s hard to like people who scare the hell out of you.”
Through the cellar door, they could hear the thud of the shovel hitting soil. Digging deeper into the house’s secrets. A house that, even years later, still bore silent witness to something terrible.
“This was a small town, Dr. Isles. Not like it is now, with all these new folks coming in from away, buying up summer places. Back then, it was just locals, and you got to know people. Which families are good, and which ones you should stay away from. I figured that out about Elijah Lank when I was fourteen years old. He was one of the boys you stayed the hell away from.” She moved back to the table and sank into a chair, as though exhausted. Stared at the Formica surface, as though looking into a pool at her own reflection. A reflection of a fourteen- year-old girl, afraid of the boy who lived on this mountain.
Maura waited, her gaze on that bowed head with its stiff brush of gray hair. “Why did he scare you?”
“I wasn’t the only one. We were all afraid of Elijah. After…”
“After what?”
Miss Clausen looked up. “After he buried that girl alive.”
In the silence that followed, Maura could hear the murmur of men’s voices as they dug deeper into the cellar floor. She could feel her own heart throbbing against her ribs. Jesus, she thought. What are they going to find down there?
“She was one of the new kids in town,” said Miss Clausen. “Alice Rose. The other girls’d sit behind her and make comments. Tell jokes about her. You could say all kinds of mean things about Alice and get away with it, because she couldn’t hear you. She never knew we were making fun of her. I know we were being cruel, but that’s the sort of thing kids do when they’re fourteen. Before they learn to put themselves in someone else’s shoes. Before they get a taste of it themselves.” She sighed, a sound of regret for childhood transgressions, for all the lessons learned too late.
“What happened to Alice?”
“Elijah said it was just a joke. He said he always planned to pull her out after a few hours. But can you imagine what it was like, being trapped inside a hole? So terrified that you wet yourself? And no one can hear you screaming. No one knows where you are except the boy who put you in there.”
Maura waited, silent. Afraid to hear the story’s ending.
Miss Clausen saw the apprehension in her eyes and shook her head. “Oh, Alice didn’t die. It was the dog saved her. He knew where she was. Kept barking his fool head off, led people right to the spot.”
“Then she survived.”
The woman nodded. “They found her late that night. By then, she’d been in the hole for hours. When they pulled her out, she was barely speaking. Like a zombie. A few weeks later, her family moved away. I don’t know where they went.”
“What happened to Elijah?”
Miss Clausen gave a shrug. “What do you think happened? He kept insisting it was just a prank. The sort of thing the rest of us kids were doing to Alice every day in school. And it’s true, we all tormented her. We all made her miserable. But Elijah, he took it to the next level.”
“He wasn’t punished?”
“When you’re only fourteen, you get a second chance. Especially when people need you at home. When your dad’s drunk half the day, and there’s a nine-year-old cousin living in the same house.”
“Amalthea,” said Maura softly.
Miss Clausen nodded. “Imagine being a little girl in this house. Growing up in a family of beasts.”
The air suddenly felt charged. Maura’s hands had gone cold. She thought of Amalthea Lank’s ravings.
And she thought of the scratch mark clawed into her car door.
The cellar door creaked open, startling Maura. She turned and saw Rizzoli standing in the doorway.
“They’ve hit something,” Rizzoli said.
“What is it?”
“Wood. Some kind of panel, about two feet down. They’re trying to clear away the dirt now.” She pointed to the box of trowels on the counter. “We’ll need those.”
Maura carried the box down the cellar steps. She saw that piles of excavated earth now ringed the perimeter of their trench, extending almost six feet long.
The size of a coffin.
Detective Corso, who now wielded the shovel, glanced up at Maura. “Panel feels pretty thick. But listen.” He banged the shovel against the wood. “It’s not solid. There’s an air space underneath.”
Yates said, “You want me to take over now?”
“Yeah, my back’s about to give out.” Corso handed over the shovel.
Yates dropped into the trench, his shoes thudding onto the wood. A hollow sound. He attacked the dirt with grim determination, flinging it onto a rapidly growing mound. No one spoke as more and more of the panel emerged. The two flood lamps slanted their harsh light across the trench, and Yates’s shadow bounced like a marionette on the cellar walls. The others watched, silent as grave robbers eagerly awaiting their first glimpse into a tomb.
“I’ve cleared one edge here,” said Yates, breathing hard, his shovel scraping across wood. “Looks like some kind of crate. I’ve already dinged it with the shovel. I don’t want to damage the wood.”
“I’ve got the trowels and brushes,” said Maura.
Yates straightened, panting, and clambered out of the hole. “Okay. Maybe you can clear off that dirt on top. We’ll get some photos before we pry it open.”
Maura and Gary dropped into the trench, and she felt the panel shudder under their weight. She wondered what horrors lay beneath the stained planks, and had a terrible vision of the wood suddenly giving way, of plunging into decayed flesh. Ignoring her pounding heart, she knelt down and began to sweep dirt away from the panel.
“Hand me one of those brushes, too,” said Rizzoli, about to jump into the trench as well.
“Not you,” said Yates. “Why don’t you just take it easy?”
“I’m not handicapped. I hate standing around doing nothing.”
Yates gave an anxious laugh. “Yeah, well, we’d hate seeing you go into labor down there. And I wouldn’t want to have to explain it to your husband, either.”
Maura said, “There’s not much maneuvering room down here, Jane.”
“Well, let me reposition these lamps for you. So you can see what you’re doing.”
Rizzoli moved a flood lamp, and suddenly light beamed down on the corner where Maura was working. Crouched on her knees, Maura used the brush to clear soil from the planks, uncovering pinpoints of rust. “I’m seeing old nail heads here,” she said.
“I’ve got a crowbar in the car,” said Corso. “I’ll get it.”
Maura kept brushing away dirt, uncovering the rusted heads of more nails. The space was cramped, and her neck and shoulders began to ache. She straightened her back. Heard a clank behind her.
“Hey,” said Gary. “Look at this.”
Maura turned and saw that Gary’s trowel had scraped up against an inch of broken pipe.
“Seems to come straight up through the edge of this panel,” said Gary. With bare fingers, he gingerly probed the rusted protrusion and broke through a clot of dirt crusting the top. “Why would you stick a pipe into a…” He stopped. Looked at Maura.
“It’s an air hole,” she said.
