“Hand me the crowbar, will you please?” I said to Basier.
He scowled, not sure whether to demand proof of my right to be in the house or not. After glaring for a moment to make sure I knew he could be tough if he had to, he turned on his heel and left.
I sighed and climbed back out of the trunk to get my tools. Before going back to work, I relocked the front door from the inside.
I plugged the flex lamp into an outlet behind the refrigerator and hooked it onto the edge of the cabinet. I brought two chairs in from the front room and put one on either side of the cabinet wall so I could get in and out more easily.
With the crowbar and the shovel, I moved the bags around until I found the trapdoor. It could be opened with a ring sunk into a groove, but when I lifted the ring and tugged it didn’t budge. There wasn’t any lock; decades of dirt and warping had glued it into the floor.
I gave it the same glare Basier had turned on me a few minutes before, but that didn’t open the trap. I stuck the crowbar into the ring, but still couldn’t move the door. Finally I grabbed the pick and started battering the middle of the trapdoor. After five minutes I managed to whack a fat splinter out of it. I could get the crowbar under that; I gave a last mighty heave and the door broke into pieces.
I rubbed my shoulders, but I was too keyed up to waste time resting. I put on the mask and pulled the flex light over to hook on the broken edge of the trapdoor.
Sure enough, steep stairs, little more than a ladder nailed into a rough frame, led to a cellar with a dirt floor. Oh, V.I., you are a detective without peer. Now detect what is down here.
I started cautiously down the stairs with my digging tools. My shadow bobbed and weaved against the floor, with the end of the pick looking like Death’s scythe. Death had been following in my wake lately; I didn’t like being her harbinger. I flung the tools down the stairs; they landed with a dull thud on the dirt floor. I stuck up an arm for the flex light and brought it as far down as the cord would stretch.
The room was small, just the size of the kitchen overhead. A spider as big as the palm of my hand scuttled up the wall and disappeared through a crack in the boards overhead. I wished I’d brought a hard hat.
The walls were lined with shelves, empty for the most part, except for some odds and ends of electrical work, screws, wires, a pair of clippers. Incongruously, in one corner stood a couple of jars of mushy gray stuff. Canned pears, a faded and peeling label said. I couldn’t hold back a shudder at the thought of what was in there now.
I took my pencil flash out of my jeans pocket and started a meticulous search of the floor, looking for a place where the soil might have been dislodged to bury something half a century ago. Time hadn’t exactly leveled the floor, but it had made the minor hills and valleys uniform across its surface.
I didn’t want to dig up the whole floor, and I didn’t want to start chopping at it with my pick, in case something fragile lay underneath. I finally went back up the stairs to rummage in Julius’s utility closet. He didn’t have much equipment, but he did have a few screwdrivers.
I took the two longest down with me to use as probes, delicately twisting them into the soil up to their handles. About five feet from the bottom of the stairs, I struck something hard. I used the curved end of the crowbar as a makeshift trowel and started clearing dirt away from the spot. I shone my pencil flash into the hole I’d created.
Something brownish, matted. I took off my right glove and stuck a tentative hand into the hole. Fabric, heavily layered with dirt. I pulled on it gently, but couldn’t bring it up. Bit by bit, I excavated along a line dictated by my probings with the screwdrivers. My neck was sore, my arms and hamstrings quivering, by the time I’d created a trough some three feet by two feet.
I took out my knife and cut away a piece of the fabric, carefully lifting it so that the dirt didn’t spill on what lay underneath. I shone my flash again. It wasn’t a plutonium bomb, but a suit jacket, a woman’s jacket. Mold and damp had turned it a grayish-brown. Only the buttons still gleamed under my flashlight.
I held my breath as I peeled the fabric back. It fell apart under my hand, revealing the bones underneath.
“My God, Julius, you lived with this beneath you all these years? How could you?”
I’d been alone for so many hours I spoke out loud, my voice startling me in the confined space. “Who was she? Martina? Gertrud Memler? Did you kill her? Is that why you thought a detective should come for you?”
But this had been Breen’s house, Breen’s workshop. Whoever this was, however she’d come to be here, her death and burial were a secret shared by the four men, the Breens and the Dzornens.