Authors: Katherine Hall Page

The Body in the Basement (4 page)

Samantha gave a yank and a large chunk of earth flew up, revealing more of the quilt. And as it unfolded, something else was exposed.

That something else was a human hand.

Chapter 2

At first, Pix thought it was one of those plastic joke hands that had been all the rage in Maine the previous summerâsticking out of someone's trunk or trash can. The first time she'd seen one, she'd laughed. After a while, it got boringâand ghoulish.

This hand wasn't plastic.

Pix and Samantha looked at each other, aghast. Samantha was the first to speak.

“It's a dead body, isn't it?” she whispered. Her face looked pale and sickly.

Pix gently lifted the hand with the stick. It was flaccid and curiously heavy. The cuff of a blue denim work shirt was revealed. Pix assumed there was an arm attached, leading to all the other parts wrapped in the quilt in the shallow grave. She nodded and stood up. Her legs were shaking.

“I'll stay here and you go to the Hamiltons' for help. They're the closest. Take the dogs.”

“No, Mom. Keep the dogs with you.”

“All right,” Pix agreed. The dogs could slow Samantha down if they decided to chase a squirrel or even a leaf blowing across the path. She felt immeasurably comforted to have them stay.

The two women climbed out of the hole in the ground at the lower end, opposite the spot where the body had been buried. As they walked across the level dirt, Pix gave a thought to the footprints they were obliterating, but there was nothing they could do about it now. From the moment the dog had jumped in, the murder scene had been messed up.

Murder scene. Murder. There couldn't be any doubt. This was not the way loved ones were laid to rest.

Samantha paused briefly to give her mother a hard hug. “Is this really happening?”

Pix held her close. “I'm afraid so, but I can't believe it, either. You'd better go,” she said, holding her tighter.

Samantha broke away and ran off toward the road. She was a fine athlete, and as her mother watched her graceful long-legged stride, the horrible discovery they had just made was forgotten for an instantâbut only an instant.

The first thing Pix did was to tie the dogs to one of the trees. She didn't want Artie or the others to continue the exhumation. She sat down on a granite boulder, a massive one disgorged by the inexorable progress of the glacier, and tried to think.

But the horror of their discovery was making rational thought impossible. At least she'd been able to send Samantha for help. What was filling her mind now was the picture of that hand lying there on the ground, disembodied. It was growing larger and larger in her imagination. She hadn't even noticed whether it was the right or left, and what did that matter, anyway? What mattered was that it was a person, someone who had been alive perhaps only a day or two ago. She took a tissue from her shirt pocket, blew her nose, and swallowed hard. She sat up straighter. So far, she'd done what she
was supposed to; now she had to force herself to think of something besides that hand.

For instance, whose it might be? She hadn't heard anyone was missing on the island, and her mother would certainly have mentioned it the night before. If it wasn't someone local, the police were going to have a difficult time identifying the remains. The end of the Point was a lonely, sheltered spot. A boat from anywhere along the Maine coastâor the Eastern Seaboard, for that matterâcould easily land and dispose of a body without anyone knowing.

But â¦ Her thoughts were sliding back into their old, familiar logical patterns. The killer had to be someone who knew about the construction, someone who knew the foundation hadn't been poured yet. It was too unlikely that an individual looking to get rid of a dead body would just happen upon an excavation site. No, the whole thing did not point toward chance. It pointed toward someone well acquainted with what was happening on Sanpere. Roughly 95 percent of the population.

The initial shock and disbelief were beginning to wear off and Pix was drawn to the edge of the basement, above the body. She looked down. The hand was dead white against the dark soil, just as she'd left it. She hadn't imagined the whole thing and naturally nothing had moved. She jumped into the hole again, being careful to land on the same spot and retrace her steps. Somehow, Pix couldn't continue to sit on a rock with a corpse lying a few feet away and not investigate further.

She didn't disturb anything; she simply stared at what had already been revealed and noticed several things she had missed before. There was a noticeable but small X sewn in blue thread near the border of the quilt where people sometimes put a name and date. Roman numerals? The beginning of a date? X was ten. She remembered that much from her years of Latin.

The hand looked like a man'sâor that of a hirsute woman who worked with her hands. The nails were short, uneven,
and one was blackenedâthe way a nail gets if you close it in a door or hit it with a hammer. It was the left hand, but there was no ring on the ring finger, although that didn't mean whoever it was wasn't married. Few of the men around here wore wedding bands, except to please their wives when they dressed up. The kind of work they did was not kind to jewelry.

The final thing she noticed sent her quickly up aboveground. The quilt was indeed a red-and-white one, but there were two reds, one a slightly rusty oneâdried blood. It had been a violent death.

Back on the rock with the dogs stretched out next to her, she realized she could be here a long time. It would take Samantha at least a half hour to get to the Hamiltons' house at the beginning of the Point. Nan would be in church and probably not home yet. It was Sunday, so Freeman Hamilton wouldn't be out pulling his lobster pots, and Pix hoped he was puttering around the house and not off someplace. He wouldn't go too far, though, and risk being late for his Sunday dinner.

Freeman wasn't a churchgoer. Said he liked to talk to God directly. She remembered what he'd told her once when she was a girl and he and Nan were a young married couple. He'd come by with some lobsters for her grandfather, pointed to the view of their cove, with islands that seemed to stretch beyond the horizon across the wide expanse of deep blue water, and said, “You know, if you want to speak to God, it's a local call from here.”

Pix thought a few words with the Almighty were most certainly in order now, but her mind was teeming with so many questions, such as how long the body had been there, that she settled for a few devout entreaties for the peaceful repose of whoever the unfortunate soul might be and a Godspeed for Samantha.

Pix realized that she felt oddly distanced from the event. Was she in shock? Or was it because the hand still seemed like
plastic and without a fully identified being, the death wasn't a reality yet? Nothing had been personalized, except their reactions to the idea of murder.

She must be in shock, she thought, to be thinking this way and to be thinking about what she was thinking so consciously. She was going in circles, but she wasn't frightened. Whoever had brought the body here was long gone. She tried to imagine what might have happened. An unknown man (presumably) was stabbed to death by person or persons unknown, wrapped in a quilt (why a quilt?), taken to this out-of-the-way spot either by boat or car, and buried. It would have had to have been at night. It would have been risky to come during the day, when there was a chance the construction workers might be around. She saw the scene vividly: the body wrapped in the quilt to keep the blood from leaving any telltale signs, carried from the car or boat, and placed in the basement; the digging of the grave by the dim light of a flashlight beamâmake haste; make hasteâfinally leaving the corpse and slipping back into the role or roles played everyday, with no hint of the night's work crossing a face. Her breath was almost taken away at the audacity of it all. If Pix hadn't brought the dogs, the concrete basement floor would have covered the grave and no one would have been the wiser. The Fairchilds would be living above a crime and never know it.

But wouldn't the dead person have been missed eventually? What kind of person has no one asking his whereabouts?

Pix stood up and walked farther away from the house. Sketching the scene in her mind had removed some of the distanceâor the shock was wearing off. She began to feel queasy and afraid. Where was Samantha?

Think about something else. There's nothing you can do. Why had she stayed behind? They both could have gone for help. But it had seemed wrong to leave that hand so exposed, untended. The sky was filled with the shrill cries of gulls and terns. She shuddered at the notion of their beaks pecking at the hand, unearthing more of the body in the basement.

She threw her head back and gazed up at the circling birds: herring gulls; laughing gulls; two cormorants, portentous black creatures, necks bent like shepherds' crooks as they landed on the rocks; arctic terns, streamlined and elegant, swooping gracefully among their gull cousins. She watched as one lone tern hovered over the water, then suddenly plunged headfirst after a fish. A hundred years ago, this tern would have been prey, not predator. Pix's mother invariably mentioned it at least once a season when watching the birds dart and dive. Thousands at a time were killed in their summer nesting grounds and island women were hired to skin them, preparing them for the New York feather market to grace a hat or trim a dress. The terns were saved from extinction just in the nick of time by the first Audubon Societies and legislation controlling the plumage trade.

The terns were summer people. They were from “away” and had nested on the islands at their own peril. The corpse lying here under the sky, was it someone from away, as well? Someone unknown and unfamiliar to the island who could vanish without a trace? Vanish as the terns nearly had?

Samantha must surely be at the Hamiltons' house by now.

Think of other things.

It was almost July, but the long hard winter buffeting the island with snow and heavy rains until late April had delayed the already-short growing season even further. And now it was dry. There wouldn't be the traditional fresh peas to go with salmon for the Fourth of July. No one had been able to sow much of anything Memorial Day weekend because the weather had been so bad. Pix imagined what her garden would look like in August: green tomatoes that she'd have to bring back to Aleford to ripen between sheets of newspaper; lettuce; too many zucchini; the eggplant was doubtfulâHer pessimistic reverie was interrupted by a loud shout.

“What the hell are you doing here!”

She hadn't heard anyone approach, and it was obviously not Freeman Hamilton, Samantha, or Sergeant Dickinson.

She jumped to her feet and ran in the direction of the shore, with some notion of trying to attract attention from a passing sailboat.

The tethered dogs were barking their heads off. As she raced down the slope toward the beach, her heart pounding with fear and from the exertion, she glanced back at the animals and caught sight of the intruder. It was Seth Marshall, glowering. His long dark hair, heavy mustache, and the anger in his eyes made him look like a pirate from a children's book illustration.

Pix stopped abruptly and turned around. Her own anger of an hour ago returned full force, fueled in addition by the fright he had given her.

“What do you mean what am I doing here? How about what the hell
you
were supposed to be doing here? I thought you were building a house. The foundation isn't even poured!”

Her voice was booming and she was almost face-to-face with him before she collected herself. Seth Marshall knew when and where the concrete foundation was going to be poured. Seth Marshall had a handy pickup filled with shovels and all sorts of other digging equipment. Seth Marshall's mother was a quilter.

“I didn't know it was you.” He was almost apologizing. “Don't want people messing around out here.”

“When were you here last?” She wanted some information before she broke the news.

“Look, Pix, I can't afford to turn work down. I told the Fairchilds that when they hired me. I've got to make enough in the spring and summer to last me all year. The Athertons needed some repairs at the camp before they could open and I've been over there the last few weeks. And I've been finishing a cottage for some people on the reach road. But we'll be here every daylight hour from now on. The soil is good and dry. We'll be able to get everything done, even the floor, by
the end of the week. The Fairchilds will have their place before Labor Day. That's a promise.”

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