Riptide (7 page)

“You okay?” he asked.

“They’re dead people, Casey. They’re not going to hurt me.”

He stepped inside, instantly dominating her space without even trying. He wore all his gear—Sam Browne belt with its holstered service pistol and baton; portable radio; handcuffs clinking as he walked. She was always amazed at how much stuff a patrol cop had on, the sheer weight of it, like a suit of chain mail.

For all that, he was lithe, not bulky. His training routine, he’d told her, focused on aerobic conditioning; he had the lean, toned physique of a swimmer. No paunch, no baby fat, nothing soft about him except his wispy blondish hair.

He glanced around the living room. “Where’s the cellar?”

“Over there. But—”

“I’ll check it out.”

“You don’t have to.”

“Stop telling me what I don’t have to do.”

He strode to the trapdoor, which she’d left open. He stepped onto the stairs and tried the light switch.

“Bulb’s dead,” she said.

He gave her a look. “Good home maintenance skills, Silence.”

“Unlike one of us, I’m a white-collar professional, Wilkes.”

He pulled out his flashlight, one of the small rubber models that had replaced the bulky steel MagLites of earlier years. As he proceeded down the stairs, she knelt behind him and put her foot on the topmost tread. He looked back. “Where do you think you’re going?”

“Downstairs with you.”

“You need a second look at these bad boys?”

“Not really.”

“So stay put. I’ll be back in a jiffy.”

“Did you just say
jiffy
?”

“I have a prodigious vocabulary. It’s one of my many appealing qualities that you’ve so far failed to detect.”

“Me and everybody else.”

“You’re just full of snappy comebacks today, aren’t you, Munchkin?” He reached the bottom of the stairs and disappeared.

“Don’t call me Munchkin,” she said after him.

She’d met Casey at one of Draper’s crime scenes while he was commanding the day watch. He was thirty-four, brash, and approximately as good-looking as he believed himself to be. He’d asked her out; she’d demurred. On subsequent occasions when they’d run into each other, this ritual was repeated. Their relationship had developed a peculiar dynamic—he was always on the make, she was always brushing him off. She’d made her lack of interest clear enough, but out of some combination of stubbornness and masochism he refused to be deterred.

An uncomfortably long period of time had passed with no sound from below. “You all right down there?” she called.

His voice came back to her. “Right as rain. I’ve confirmed one fact, at least. They’re
definitely
dead.”

“What gave it away, the lack of flesh tones or the lack of flesh?”

“And I don’t think they were buried in any sort of family crypt.”

“Why not?”

He appeared at the base of the staircase. “Because in a proper burial, the corpse isn’t naked. I didn’t see any clothes, did you?”

“Clothes can disintegrate over time.”

“In a damp environment.” He climbed the stairs, angling his flashlight downward so it wouldn’t blind her. “That wall cavity is nice and dry. Besides, even if the fabric disintegrated, there would be buttons, zippers.” He emerged from the cellar and got to his feet. “And shoes,” he added.

“Shoes. Right.”

“There aren’t any shoes, Short Round. Which suggests to me that this wasn’t a formal burial. And there’s another thing.”

“I’m not sure I want to hear it. And don’t call me Short Round.”

He stepped a little too close to her. She smelled chili dogs on his breath. She moved back, though the smell wasn’t bad. Onions and beans.

“The bones are all mixed up together. Bits and pieces. These people weren’t laid out neatly side by side. They were tossed in there, one on top of the other.”

“Maybe there was an epidemic...or an accident. Something where there were a lot of fatalities, and the bodies had to be buried quickly.” She knew she was reaching even as she said it.

He laced his fingers together and cracked his knuckles one at a time, the pops reminding her of cartilage, of bone.

“If it was an epidemic,” he said, “the remains would have been burned, not buried. And if it was a disaster, like a quake, there would have been time afterwards for a proper disposal of the bodies.” He cracked the last knuckle. “Health codes in the olden days might not have been what they are now, but I doubt anybody would be allowed to inter a bunch of dead bodies in a fruit cellar. Society frowns on that kind of thing.”

“I guess you’re right. Which means they were...” She didn’t want to say
murdered
.

“Yeah. That’s what it means. Hey, why the long face?
You
didn’t do it.”

“This house has been in my family a long time.”

He saw where she was going. “How long?” he asked in a softer tone.

“Forever. My great-grandfather lived here. He may have been the original owner. But we don’t have any records that go back that far.” Or at least, she didn’t have the records. Richard might.

Casey frowned. “Well...let’s not go jumping to any conclusions.”

“It looks like the conclusions are jumping to us.”

“There may be some perfectly innocent explanation.”

“Any suggestions as to what it might be?”

“Let’s wait till we know more. Traffic stops and drug busts I can handle. DBs are someone else’s job.”

Dead bodies. DBs. She wished he hadn’t put it like that. It objectified the victims, made them less than persons.

He shifted his balance, the cuffs on his belt tinkling. “Is there any history of, um, criminal activity in your family?”

She didn’t answer immediately. “No.”

“Why the hesitation?”

She was thinking there
was
a history of mental illness. But she didn’t want to tell him so. “We’re not a family of criminals,” she said brusquely.

“I didn’t say—”

“Nobody in my family had anything to do with this.”

His hands went up. “All right, I hear you.”

“No, you don’t hear me. You
never
hear me. I told you it wasn’t necessary for you to come over. You’re here, anyway. I told you it wasn’t necessary to look in the cellar. You looked. And now you’re telling me things—”

“That you don’t want to know.”

She turned away, her shoulders stiff. “I’m keeping you from your job, Sergeant.”

“I don’t mind.”

“I do.”

“Right. You do.” He walked to the front door. “I’ll have someone over here as soon as possible. A detective and an ME. What with the quake, it won’t be right away. Everything’s all fouled up. Roads, phone lines, you name it.”

“It’s no problem.”

“Tomorrow, probably. We can get them here tomorrow.”

“Great.”

“Problem?”

“I guess I’m not crazy about having a bunch of dead people in my cellar overnight.”

“You can bunk at my place. I have a foldout couch—not that we’d need it.”

“I’d rather sleep with the skeletons.”

“Ouch. That’s a wicked tongue you’ve got there, Mini-Me. Okay, enjoy your night in a haunted house. And don’t touch anything down there, don’t disturb the remains—”

“I was planning to take out the skulls and make them into Halloween lanterns. Not a good idea?”

“I would take a pass on that. At least until the ME has had a look.” He stepped outside with a parting wave. “See you.”

“Hey, Casey?”

“Yeah?”

“Don’t call me Mini-Me.”

She watched him return to his squad car and drive away. She wondered, not for the first time, exactly why she kept sending him signals to back off. Maybe because he really
didn’t
hear her. Didn’t listen. Refused to take her seriously. Like Sean, her college beau.

Still, she still liked him. His persistence was comically ingratiating. The truth was, she didn’t know what the hell she wanted. Some psychologist she was. She could read the minds of strangers, but not her own.

In the pantry, the trapdoor was still open. She almost shut it, and then Richard’s voice came back to her:
You can’t even stand the sight of blood.

It wasn’t blood. It was a cadaver...

A body under a sheet, wheeled in on a gurney. She remembered how the wheels squeaked on the tile floor. The instructor whisked off the sheet, revealing the body of an old man, spindly and gnarled, tufts of white clinging to his sunken chest. A cadaver for dissection.

She was chosen to make the first incision. Probably the prof saw how nervous she was, blanched with fear. He might have found it amusing to hand her the scalpel.

She stood over the dead man, unable to depress the blade into the waxy flesh. Finally she handed back the scalpel and left the room.

The next day she gave up her pursuit of an MD and shifted her sights to psychology.

There was no reason for her to be ashamed of the episode. But she was. She came from a family of doctors. Her grandfather, father, and brother had practiced medicine. She’d wanted to be the first woman in the family to do likewise. And it still bugged her that she hadn’t stayed in the room with the dead man.

Well, she had been in rooms with dead people since then. She had been to crime scenes. She had seen Marilyn Diaz pulled from the water.

She wouldn’t be scared off by a bunch of rotting bones.

Flashlight in hand, she descended into the cellar. At least now she had an explanation for the dead bolt on the underside of the trapdoor. Whoever interred these bodies made sure he wouldn’t be disturbed in his work.

She reached the scatter of fallen bricks and, kneeling, peered at the nest of skeletons. The floor of the burial chamber was loose sandy soil. The back wall was a sandstone outcrop. She scanned the crypt with her flashlight and saw small scuttling things among the bones. Their black carapaces gleamed like shards of onyx.

Nothing to fear. No reason to be creeped out.

She tracked one beetle as hurried over the mound. A small obstruction blocked its path, and it skittered to one side.

The obstruction was something silver, metallic. Nearly invisible, a fleck of metal in the dirt.

She reached in, stretching her arm over the bone pile, and touched the thing. The metal was smooth, rusted in spots. It extended under the soil. Something was buried there.

Deliberately buried? She didn’t think so. It appeared as if loose dirt had cascaded down from the roof of the crypt, dislodged by today’s quake or any of the seismic events of the past century, or just the slow passage of time.

She swept away some of the dirt, exposing more of the metal surface. Her fingers brushed against something sharp. A corner.

Carefully she cleaned off the rest of it. The thing was a rectangle, ten inches square.

The lid of a tin box.

She probed the dirt until she found a handle, like the handle of a lunch bucket.

Casey had told her not to disturb the scene. But the tin intrigued her.

She tested its weight, lifting it by the handle. Not heavy. She could remove it without disrupting the remains.

She pulled a little harder, and the lid popped up. A rusted clasp on the front had opened.

She couldn’t resist the temptation to look inside. Probably a bad idea—Pandora’s box, and all that. She did it anyway, angling the flashlight to reveal the tin’s contents.

What she saw was a book. Frayed black covers. Faint smell of mold.

Paper deteriorated rapidly when stored in adverse conditions, but the tin had kept the book safe from vermin, sealed away from visible light and airborne pollutants. The crypt would be cool year round, and the space was dry enough to inhibit excessive mold formation. The box itself would have prevented too many mold spores from settling on the book and foxing its pages.

She looked more closely at the volume. Embossed in gilt Gothic on the front cover was the word
Journal
.

She knew then that she had to examine it.

Lowering the lid, she put both hands around the tin and lifted it free. It was crusted in earth, dragging clumps of loose soil and a single black beetle that fell off the bottom and scuttled away.

eight

In her study, she placed the box on the examination table and lifted out the diary. Her hands trembled a little.

The book was ready to fall apart. The binding was badly cracked. The covers were calfskin, black, dry, stiff with age. Other than the gilt word
Journal
there was no lettering on the front cover, and no decoration except a band of silver running down the spine. Some of the silver had flaked away.