A Brilliant Death (28 page)

“Maybe it was just the concrete left over from making the cap. They just poured it down the cistern.”

“Sure,” Travis said. “They poured the cap, then after it hardened they reopened it and dumped what was left down the cistern. Makes perfect sense to me.”

My jaw started to tighten. “Might I remind you that you’re lipping off to the only guy in the free world who would allow himself to be lowered into a cistern, at night, to look for a body?”

That brought a grin. “Was it just in a pile, or was it completely covering the bottom?”

“It was higher in the middle than around the sides, but it covers the entire bottom of the cistern.”

“Mitchell, we’ve got to see what’s under that concrete,” he said.

“Your use of the word ‘we’ continues to amaze me.”

“Can you break it up with a sledgehammer?”

“I don’t know. Maybe. I don’t know how thick it is, and I don’t have any room down there to swing it. I’ll have to use it like a tamp.”

“Okay. Wait here. I’ll run home and get a sledge.”

“And flashlight batteries. These are about done.”

Travis ran off through the brush to the creek bank. I could hear him for only a minute until his footfalls were drowned out by the sounds of the stacks clearing at the power plant south of town. He was back in twenty minutes, puffing for air. He handed me two new batteries, and I put them in the flashlight. The beam was bright against the wall of the cistern. “Much better.” I slipped the light back in my pocket and my right foot back in the cable loop. Travis lowered me a few feet, handed me the sledge, then sent me on my final descent. I was a little more comfortable with the drop and the darkness. I kicked the dirt from one side of the concrete, then straddled the area, allowing the head of the sledge hammer to dangle between my legs. I lifted my hands to eye height, then slammed the sledge straight down. The head hit crooked and the handle jerked out of my hands. I stumbled forward and smacked my knuckles against the rock wall, scraping them clear of skin. “Yowl!”

“You okay?” Travis echoed.

I shined the flashlight on them. Skinned, but not a lot of blood. “I’ll be fine.”

The concrete was several inches thick at the center of the cistern. The second hit struck closer to the wall. It sounded hollow and seemed to give a little. I hit it several more times, each strike a little harder than the one before. On the sixth hit, the cement cracked. I set the sledge to the side and lit the area with the flashlight.

“What’d you find?” Travis asked.

“Nothing.”

The light was still strong, and it easily lit up the bottom of the cistern. There were two cracks in the concrete, creating a rough, pie-shaped wedge. I moved a few small chunks of concrete that had broken loose at the point and wedged an index finger under the concrete and lifted, carefully standing it against the wall and turning my light on the floor.

I would have expected to have panicked, but it wasn’t scary, actually. In fact, there was something oddly serene about the tiny bones lying in the black earth beneath the yellow beam of my light. It was a browned wrist bone and the delicate bones of a pinky, ring finger, and middle finger, resting in the dirt lengthwise along the top of the opening. I stared at the skeletal remains for several minutes, hunching over it to block Travis’s view. How would I tell him? In his heart, he had wanted desperately to believe his dad had not been involved. He still held faint hope that she was alive. Now, there was no doubt as to her fate. For a minute, I pondered sliding the concrete wedge back into place and telling him I had found nothing. “Goddammit, Travis. Why didn’t you just leave well enough alone?” I muttered.

“What’d you say?” he asked.

“Talking to myself,” I said.

He had found his grandparents. He could have just walked away. I took hold of the concrete wedge and was ready to recover the grave when the beam of my flashlight caught the glint of metal. I took my pen knife from my pocket and used the smaller of the two blades to gently move some of the dirt. On the ring finger, pushed down on the first knuckle of the hand, was a ring. I slipped the blade between the ring and the bone, lifting it free, then used the knife to slide the bone back to its resting place. The light on the ring gave me chills, much more so than the sight of the bones. It was gold—a crescent of rubies around a small, marquis diamond. It was the ring from the journal, the ring that Amanda Baron had accepted as a testament of Big Frank’s love. The concrete I had moved was, without question, the cover of Amanda Baron’s crypt.

I pushed the ring and the knife deep into my pocket and slid the concrete back into place.

“What the hell’s going on?” Travis asked. “What’re you doing?”

“Comin’ up.” I put the head of the sledge in the crease of my elbow and my foot in the loop. “Bring ’er up.”

I could hear the whine of the motor as it lifted me toward the opening. It was a long, slow ride—a trip to the dentist, the long walk to the principal’s office, but worse. I wondered what he would do when he realized that his dad, in fact, had killed his mother?

Travis stopped the winch as my head neared the two planks and grabbed the sledge. I put my left hand on the top rim of the cistern and the right on the nearest plank, and Travis winched me up until I could step away from the hole.

“Nothing?” Travis asked.

I turned on the flashlight and handed it to him, then reached into my pocket and pressed the ring into his open palm. “I’m sorry I busted your chops about looking down there.” I think he knew what it was before it was hit by the light. I stood beside him as he inspected the ring. There was nothing to say. His dad was a murderer, and the remains of his mother lay beneath a concrete slab at the bottom of an abandoned cistern on Shaft Row. Travis sat cross-legged at the edge of the cistern and tried to fight back tears.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

Travis bought a rusting 1958 Rambler from Keltenecker Used Cars for a hundred dollars, and I would argue that even that was too much. It was an oil-burning heap with a dog of a push-button transmission that you had to continually monkey with to get into reverse. Snookie was working at McKinstry’s Sunoco, and every other day he would fill a gallon jug of used crankcase oil for Travis to use in the Rambler.

“You can’t put that used oil in your car,” Snookie had protested when Travis first made the request. “It’ll ruin it.”

“Snook, it burns oil so fast, it won’t be in there long enough to hurt anything.”

The Rambler had been on Mr. Keltenecker’s lot for months, and I’m sure he was glad to get rid of it. Despite the plume of white smoke that followed us everywhere, and the fact that Travis couldn’t get it into reverse—I had to push it backward out of his parking space at school—Travis was happy for the cheap transportation.

It was early May when Travis eased the Rambler into the gravel parking lot on the river side of the main entrance of Ohio Valley Cement and Masonry Company. When he cut the lights, the security guard’s flashlight came on and he walked toward the car, not shining the light directly on Travis until he stepped out of the car. As soon as he recognized Travis, Tornik holstered the flashlight and walked up to the chain-link fence. “Well, well, if it isn’t the intrepid detectives.”

Tornik looked bad. It had been ten months since we had last seen him, but he seemed to have aged dramatically. He was grayer, and the lines that creased his forehead and cheeks ran deep through his face, giving it a reptilian appearance. The rough life and booze appeared to be overtaking him at a gallop. The omnipresent cigarette wasn’t doing him any good, either, and he was developing a deep smoker’s cough that was painful to hear. Travis leaned against the fence, clinging to it above his head. “Can we talk? I promise not to be a smart ass.”

Tornik checked his watch. “Sure. I’ve got a few minutes.” He walked through the open front gate and pointed toward his car, which was just a few spaces down from Travis’s. I got into the back seat and let Travis have the front.

Spring had been slow creeping into the Upper Ohio River Valley. Travis was wearing a denim jacket and jeans. Despite the chill, he rolled down the window of Tornik’s Pontiac to vent the cigarette smoke. “Didn’t expect to ever see you again. What’s up?” Tornik asked.

“You were right,” Travis said. “All along, you were right.” He turned and looked at Tornik. “He killed her. My dad murdered my mom.”

Tornik took a long drag on his cigarette and slowly allowed the smoke to escape his mouth. “Sounds like you’re convinced. What made you change your mind?”

Travis held up the ring. “Among other things, this.”

Tornik took it from Travis and inspected the ring. “I’ll bite. What’s this have to do with anything?”

“That’s my mother’s ring, the one my dad gave her when they were dating, just before they got married. She wrote about it in her journal, and she was wearing it the night she died.”

Tornik turned on the dome light and examined the ring a little more closely, trying to see if there was something particular about it that he was missing. “So, where’d you get it?”

“Off her finger,” Travis said.

He turned his head and frowned. “Excuse me?”

Travis nodded. “Off my mom’s finger. We found her body.”

“Who found it?”

Travis nodded toward the back seat. “Me an’ Mitch. We found it at the bottom of the cistern at the old house—the one they were living in when Mom disappeared. It burned down later.”

Tornik nodded. “You mean the one your dad torched for the insurance money?”

“Given everything I’ve learned in the past year, that wouldn’t surprise me in the least.”

“Tell me about the body.”

“He must have killed her and put her body in the cistern, and then hid it under some concrete.”

“What on earth prompted you to look in the cistern?”

“It’s a long story. I had a hunch she was there, and she was. Just bones, now, but she’s there.”

“Jesus Christ.” Tornik pinched the bridge of his nose between his index and middle fingers. “Have you told anyone?”

Travis shook his head. “No, not yet.”

“How about you, slick?” he asked, turning his head to the back seat.

“No, sir. It’s not the kind of thing I’d want getting back to Big Frank, at least not yet.”

You could almost see the wheels turning in Chase Tornik’s head. I imagine he was feeling like a cop again, proud that his instincts had been right—Amanda Baron had been murdered.

“I’m thinking of going to the cops, but I wanted to talk to you first,” Travis said. “I want to know what information is in those other pages you tore out of the report. I’ve come to terms with this. He killed her. Period. But now I need to know what you know. If my mom didn’t die in the river, who was on that boat? Who were the man and woman who jumped into the river?”

“Jesus, kid, you’ve really thrown me here. You’re sure? You’re absolutely sure that it was a human skeleton? You actually saw the body?”

“Yeah,” I said. “The ring was still on the finger.”

Tornik put his cigarette between his lips and reached across the car and unlocked the glove compartment. Inside were four pages, neatly folded and attached by a paper clip. “I figured you would be back,” he said. Tornik smoothed them out and quickly read them over before passing the top two sheets to Travis. I leaned forward to read them by the dim glow of the dome light.

The pages had been typed and, though the copy was light, it was still legible.