She retrieved two probes and a fistful of survey flags from the back of the vehicle and handed one of the probes to me. It was a stainless-steel rod, four feet long and about the thickness of my index finger, with a one-foot handle across the top that formed a tall, skinny T. “Pick a grave, any grave,” she said. I pointed to the cross closest to us, which was at one corner of the cluster of markers. “Which side of the cross do you suppose the grave would be on?” I shrugged; without a plaque or marker—and with such dense ferns underfoot—it was impossible to tell.
“How about we probe both directions? That way, no matter which way the grave is dug, we’ll find it. If it’s there to find.”
Starting a foot above and below the cross, we pushed the probes into the ground. Mine went in easily, halfway up to the handle, before hitting tightly packed soil; Angie’s, on the other hand, hit hard clay half a foot down. Working our way farther from the cross—and to either side of our starting points—we probed repeatedly. Again and again mine passed through loose, disturbed earth, and I marked each of these holes with a survey flag; again and again Angie’s probe hit hardpan just below the topsoil. Finally, after I’d lengthened and widened my grid considerably, I began hitting hard dirt, too, which told me that I’d reached the margins of the disturbed area, and was now encountering undisturbed soil. I stepped back so Angie could photograph what I’d flagged. The ten flags defined an oval-shaped area of loose, disturbed soil, about two feet wide by six feet long: just about the size hole you’d dig to bury a teenage boy.
Angie was adding notes to her sketch when Vickery returned at a jog. He was sweating and breathing hard. He took in the flags, and his eyebrows shot up. “Looks like you two have been busy.”
“You were gone awhile, so we found something to do,” said Angie. “Quacks like a grave to me, even if it isn’t where the dog’s been digging. What’s up?”
“This cemetery is gonna stir up a shit storm,” he said. “Even if the skulls didn’t come from here. The commissioner—the big boss, the head of FDLE,” he explained for my benefit, “has a call in to the governor. I’m afraid we’re about to have a lot more people looking over our shoulders.”
“Maybe that’s the best thing that could happen,” I offered. “Seems like the boys at this school fell through the cracks all those years ago. Maybe now people will finally pay some attention.”
“Maybe,” conceded Vickery. “But I wouldn’t bet my pension on it.”
Chapter 15
The Twilight Motor Court was well named; I suspected the sun had set on its glory days—if indeed there had ever been glory days—decades ago. The motel consisted of seven cinder-block bungalows, which might have been new and clean in the 1950s, but which now ranged from seedy to crumbling. The two that sat farthest from the road were roofless and windowless. Mine, number three, seemed intact, but the ridgeline of the roof sagged, the paint on the trim was peeling, and the bottom of the door sported a wooden fringe where the outer layer of veneer was peeling and splintering. An ancient air conditioner in the side wall rasped and clattered, its wobbly fan grazing the cooling vanes at random intervals.
Given the complexity created by the revelation of the cemetery—given the shit storm that was brewing, as Vickery put it—he and Angie had decided we should stay nearby, eliminating the two-hour round-trip to and from Tallahassee. The nearest place to stay—the only place to stay that was within a half hour of the school site—was the Twilight.
As I wriggled the reluctant key into the lock, the knob rattled in my hand. I twisted gingerly, half expecting it to come off. It didn’t, but once the door scraped open, I almost wished it had. The room was dank and musty, a few degrees cooler than the outdoors but even more humid, and my eyes and nose began to itch at once from the onslaught of mold spores. The floor was upholstered with shag carpet—an unfortunate “update” from the 1970s, I guessed—that was pea green with reddish-brown stains . . . or maybe reddish-brown with pea-green stains. The sagging double bed was topped with a polyester bedspread of similar vintage, color, and contamination, and I shuddered to think what biological stains might fluoresce under the glow of an alternate light source. Suddenly I felt nostalgic for the Hotel Duval, with its peaceful neutrals, its glowing ceiling bubbles, and its luminous waitresses.
A seething, spattering sound emanated from the bathroom. I found the light switch and flipped it; a dim, bare bulb in the ceiling revealed a hissing faucet in the porcelain sink and a dribbling shower in a cracked fiberglass bathtub, another “update” added twenty or thirty years before. Both fixtures were streaked and stained with rust, as was the toilet. I leaned down and twisted the knobs on the bathtub. The shower’s dribble doubled in volume, but lacked the pressure required to form an actual spray.
My cell phone rang, causing me to jump. The number was Angie’s.
“Hey there,” I answered. “Welcome to the Bates Motel. Watch out for the guy with the butcher knife.”
“One difference between this and Psycho,” she said. “The bathroom in Psycho actually had a shower curtain.”
“You can have my shower curtain. I sure don’t need it. Have you checked the water pressure?”