The basement slab lay about ten feet below the top of the cinder-block wall on which I stood. It wouldn’t be hard to hang from the wall and drop down into the basement. It was getting back out again that I was concerned about. A drop of several feet was easy; an upward leap of several feet was a whole ’nother matter. I could have done it back in my teens, when I was playing high-school basketball, but my knees and thighs and calves were no longer what they’d been thirty-five years before. I’d need to find or engineer a more reliable way out.
I scanned the floor for any tall objects I might stand on—an empty oil drum would do very nicely, I thought, or even a metal folding chair. Unfortunately, whoever had originally furnished the house seemed to have thought that a wooden cabin deserved wooden furnishings, for there was very little in the basement’s debris field that wasn’t some variation on the theme of charred cellulose. If I piled enough debris in a corner, I could probably jump up and grab the top of the wall, but I wasn’t entirely sure I had the upper-body strength it would take to hoist myself up. As I frowned at one of the corners, my gaze strayed to the massive stone fireplace and chimney, built into the one end wall that was not entirely below grade. Was the stonework rough enough to allow me to climb the rocks? And if so, was my balance good enough to allow me to walk the top of the cinder blocks to the nearest corner, where I could step safely back onto solid ground? As I studied the chimney and the wall, I realized there was an easier way out. On either side of the massive fireplace—set into the four-foot-wide section of cinder blocks flanking the stonework—was a small window opening. The lower sills were about chest-high, and the openings in the block measured a couple of feet square. The windows themselves had been blown out by the explosion, and the wooden frames had burned as flames roared out the openings. I’d get a pretty good coating of soot if I wriggled out through one of them, but soot was a lot less objectionable than substances I encountered on a daily basis in my line of work.
I sat down atop the wall, my feet dangling down into the basement. Twisting my body toward the corner, I leaned across and put my right hand on the end wall, keeping my left hand on the long side wall where I sat. I twisted my hips next, swinging my right leg toward the inner face of the end wall, lifting my butt off the blocks so I could turn and lower my body down into the corner. My toes scrabbled on the blocks, and I felt myself begin to fall, but then my right foot caught the windowsill and I regained my balance. Shifting both hands now to the wall above the window opening, I centered my feet on the sill, then reached down with one hand and gripped the top of the opening. Letting go of the top of the wall, I made a graceless transition from standing in the opening to squatting in the opening, then jumping down onto the concrete floor. If Olympic judges had been scoring my dismount on a scale of 1 to 10, my scores would probably have ranged from 0.1 (from the hostile French judge) to 2.1 (from the friendly U.S. judge). Still, I was down in one piece, and I was confident I could get up and out the window opening.
But now that I was here, what was I looking for? I still didn’t know. I scanned the debris, halfway hoping to spot a bright red evidence flag, maybe one labeled LOOK HERE FOR IMPORTANT CLUE, but nothing so helpful met my inquiring gaze. In the absence of a miracle, I’d need to resort to old-fashioned work—a swift but systematic search. I decided to start by reexamining the area where we’d found the skeletons, then spiral outward toward the basement walls.
The search didn’t take long. Tucked into the angle at the base of the long wall, I found a second pair of thin, unmelted copper wires leading from the melted car battery—the battery that had set off the dynamite jammed between Freddie Parnell’s teeth. This pair of wires had been concealed by a line of bricks strung along the wall. I gave the wires a tug, and they slid out from beneath the bricks. As I continued to tug, the wires led me toward the corner of the basement; by the time I got there, I’d already figured out where they went next: out the small window. Hamilton had staged the Ledbetter skeleton, the homeless man’s body, the dynamite, and the accelerant, then crawled out the window and triggered the destruction from outside. It would have been easy, I guessed, to slip away in the pandemonium created by the blast and the blaze.
I was startled by the toot of a car’s horn, then the slam of a door and the cadence of footsteps.
“Let me guess,” I heard Miranda’s voice saying above me. “It’s not him. The second skeleton’s not Hamilton, is it?”
“No,” I said. “But why do you need to guess? You saw it for yourself, didn’t you? I left the sinus right there by the light box.”
Now it was Miranda who sounded puzzled. “By what light box? In the osteo lab? I haven’t been on campus at all today.”
“Then how’d you know it’s not Hamilton? I thought about calling you once I found the missing piece of frontal sinus, but I just jumped in the truck and headed out here instead.”
Suddenly I felt a wave of dizziness, like the Ménière’s was about to kick in again.
“What are you doing here, then? How’d you know I was here?” I demanded.
“I got your message.”
“What message?”