The Murder Pit (21 page)

FORTY ONE

Detective Priscilla Hanborn was leaning against the trunk of her car—which was parked in my driveway—when I returned home. Her thick winter patrol jacket gave her the appearance of a stay puffed marshmallow man. Or woman.

“I saw small bodies scurrying around inside,” she said as soon as I stepped out of the car. “Smart kids, not answering the door.”

“They aren’t fond of visitors unless we are home,” I told her. Nor would they appreciate being referred to as ‘small bodies,’ I wanted to add. But I kept my mouth shut.

“Nothing wrong with that.” She nodded her approval, her buzz cut standing still against the cold wind. She jerked her thumb over her shoulder at the house. “I was going to show you something, if you have a minute.”

I threw my purse over my shoulder and followed her into the snow-covered yard. I trudged behind her, trying to step in her tracks so my boots wouldn’t sink into the foot of snow that had piled up along the back side of the house.

“I pulled some old blueprints from the town planner last night,” she said, glancing over her shoulder. “Found the original ones from when your house was built. It’s been bothering since me the first day I came out here.”

I shot her a confused look. The blueprints of my house had been bothering her? Since when had she become an amateur architect?

“Did you know there was an outside access point to that coal chute?” she asked me. She pointed a finger at the side of the house.

I looked down at the side of the house, but saw only siding. “No.”

She squatted down and, with her gloved hands, began clearing snow away from the siding. “It looks like way back when, they probably backed whatever they used to deliver the coal and dropped it right about here, then dropped it down into the chute so they could shovel it into the furnace.” She made a fist and knocked lightly against the siding. “Should be right about here?” She turned and looked up at me. “You mind if I pull off the siding to take a look?”

“Go ahead,” I said, unsure of how one pulled siding off to begin with.

She used both of her hands and ran her gloves along the bottom of the next to last piece of siding. She lifted with both hands and the siding gave, the long strip of white vinyl popping off with a groan. She set it to the side and then began feeling along what looked like concrete or brick beneath the siding. Her fingers flexed, her brow furrowed, and she pulled.

And out came a concrete block.

“Knew it was here somewhere,” she said with a satisfied smile. She set the cinder block to the side, then reached down and grabbed another and did the same thing. She stood and pointed. “Take a look.”

I stepped over to the opening and bent down. I could see the crawl space in the basement through the narrow opening.

“Pretty sure that’s how Mr. Stunderson’s body got into your basement,” she said. “I don’t think they used your door. Those blocks came out pretty easily…which tells me they’ve been moved and replaced recently. If they’d been in place for a long time, they would’ve been a lot harder to move. I’d guess that the ones around it were moved, too, but I didn’t want to take them all out right now. Just wanted to see if I was right about the opening.”

Which she clearly was. If we took out a few more of the blocks, it would’ve been easy for any adult to crawl into.

I stood. “So that’s how they did it.”

She hesitated, then nodded. “Would think so, yes.”

I recognized her hesitancy for what it was. “You mean, if I didn’t put his body there.”

She stared hard at me for a moment, then stuck her hands in the pockets of her jacket. “You are no longer a suspect,” she announced.

I raised an eyebrow. “Maybe you’re just saying that to see if I make some false move?”

“This isn’t TV, ma’am,” she said, frowning. “We did our due diligence on you and your family. You had no motive. And I just watched your reaction when I showed you this access point. You didn’t know it was here. Based on this information, we have no reason to believe you were involved with Mr. Stunderson’s death.”

Surprisingly, her declaration of my innocence didn’t foster any relief or goodwill. If anything, it just irritated me. Maybe because it had irked me that I was a suspect to begin with when I knew I shouldn’t have been. Maybe her decision was just too little, too late.

She shifted her boots against the snow. “So, about this access point. If I were you, I’d work on getting it sealed up.”

I wasn’t going to argue with her about that. “Yes. Thank you for letting us know.”

She nodded. “Certainly.” She scratched at her crew cut. “Let me ask you something.”

I waited, the cold seeping through my boots.

“Before the snow fell, you’re sure you never saw it?” she asked. Maybe she hadn’t believed my look of surprise when she revealed the access panel, after all.

I shook my head. “The siding on this house was one of the few things we haven’t had to replace or upgrade. The exterior was in pretty good shape.” I shrugged. “So, no. We had no way of knowing.”

She took a step away from the house, then changed her mind and shifted back toward the access point, her boots crunching against the snow. She stared hard at the opening. “Well, someone sure knew about it.”

FORTY TWO

As soon as Jake came home that night, I showed him what Detective Hanborn had shown me. He was less impressed than I was.

“There are probably holes like that all over this house,” he said, his breath billowing like smoke in the dark, frigid air.

I folded my arms across my chest. “That does not make me feel better.”

“Well, they’re probably plugged up.”

I lifted my booted foot and kicked gently at the exposed cinderblock. “We need to plug this one back up. Now.”

He opened his mouth to protest, then saw the look on my face and closed his mouth, sighing. Five minutes later, he’d changed into jeans and left for the hardware store, promising to grab a couple of pizzas on his way back. Twenty minutes later, he was back with pizza and breadsticks, much to the kids’ delight. He and I wolfed down a slice and left the rest to the kids while we headed out into the dark to seal up the blocks.

“What is that stuff?” I asked, gesturing at the bucket sitting in the snow next to him.

“Mortar.”

“What does it do?”

He stared up at me. “Seals the blocks back in place.”

From the tone of his voice, this was apparently supposed to be obvious. I didn’t know the first thing about building supplies and a retort was on the tip of my tongue but I just closed my mouth and said nothing. I knew the last thing Jake wanted to be doing after work was yet more repair work on the house. Outside. In a foot of snow.

So I stood there and offered moral support, trying to block the wind from hitting him and holding the flashlight steady so he could see.

“There’s a bond beam in here,” he said, shifting on his side and peering into the hole.

“A what?”

“A beam that helps strengthen the foundation. I think it’s okay but I’ll need to check it in the morning.” He pointed at the plastic bag sitting next to the bucket of mortar he’d bought. “Hand me one of those shims.”

I knelt down and reached inside the bag and pulled out a thin piece of wood. I handed it to him and he positioned it into place, using some kind of spreading tool as he worked the cinder block back in the whole.

“You look so…manly,” I told him.

He glared at me. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

I grinned. “I dunno. You’ve got all these tools and you’re using all these words I don’t know. It’s very sexy.” As soon as I said the word, I bit back a giggle. My conversations about Helen were clearly rubbing off on me if my go-to word to describe my husband was now ‘sexy.’

“Awesome,” he said. “I’ll be sure to use ‘mortar’ and ‘shim’ when we get into bed tonight.” He straightened and fitted the lid back on the container of mortar.

“That’s it?” I asked. “You’re done?”

“I’m done for now,” he clarified. “It has to set. And I need better lighting to see how bad the rest of the blocks are. I don’t think any are damaged but, if they are, we’re better off replacing them now, before we mortar them in and then have them crumble.”

“So it’s not done?” I frowned. “People can still get in?”

“Daisy,” he said, standing up. “No one is going to get in. No one even knows it exists.”

The words were out of my mouth before he finished his sentence. “
Someone
knows it exists.”

He didn’t say anything, just picked up the bucket and the bag and headed toward the house. I followed, the light from the flashlight bouncing wildly as I navigated the snowy, slippery terrain.

By the time we found our way back inside, we were both pink and numb.

“That was fun,” Jake said, wiggling out of his coat and rubbing his hands together in an attempt to warm them.

“The couple that mortars blocks together, stays together.”

“You probably should’ve done something, then,” he said, winking at me.

The kids had cleared the paper plates and pizza boxes from the table but the surface was still littered with crumbs. I grabbed the washcloth from the sink and scrubbed down the table.

“I found the hole,” I told him.

Jake sank on to the couch and picked up the remote. “Detective What’s Her Face found the hole.”

“Hmm. Well I remembered where it was.”

He started to slow clap, but I shot him a look and he just grinned and turned on the television. The roar of a basketball game sounded and he sank back into the cushions, propping his feet on the ottoman in front of him.

After quizzing Emily on her history chapter and supervising baths and showers for the other three, I finally sat down next to Jake and he turned the channel so the kids could watch the last hour of Night At the Museum. They’d seen it before but it was one of those movies they could watch over and over again. I kept my eyes on the screen, Grace chattering at me about the movie from her spot on my lap, but I was only half-paying attention.

I kept going back to the holes in the house—what Detective Hanborn had shown me and what Jake had managed to seal up when we’d gone outside. I thought about his comments, how there were probably multiple holes in the exterior. Were there really other points of entry? Did we need to go around the property with some sort of infrared detector and see what lurked behind the exterior? There was a room in the basement that we hadn’t fully explored, a space with a dirt floor and stuffed full of old wooden shutters and screens. We’d promised to clear it out come summer time but now I wondered what was behind those haphazard stacks. My thoughts drifted to the attic, too. There were trees right on the property line, their thick, low-lying branches almost level with the roof of the house. We’d often heard squirrels scurrying and chittering and I thought about what else might use those branches to access the roof. And, if they could get to the rood, could they get inside the attic? We’d heard scampering feet in the space above our room and had chalked it up to mice. But what if it was something else?  By the time the movie was over and I’d herded the kids up to bed, I’d convinced myself that our house had a neon ‘Open’ sign on every single side of the house, an arrow pointing to all the ways someone could get in, unannounced.

“Did you watch any of the movie?” Jake asked as he pulled off his T-shirt and climbed into bed.

“Of course.”

“Which part?”

I pulled off my socks and sweatshirt and got into bed next to him. “The part where the statues come to life.”

He chuckled and pulled the blankets over himself. “That’s almost the entire movie. And entirely not specific. I think you may have been a little preoccupied about our newly discovered door.”

“It’s a hole,” I said, correcting him. I sighed. “But it might as well be a door.”

He nodded. “Be the right size for a raccoon. Or a midget.”

I narrowed my eyes. “You aren’t helping.”

“I sealed the cinder blocks!”

“Some of them,” I reminded him. I shifted closer and tucked my feet under his calves. “You said yourself that you need to do it when it’s daylight.”

He laughed again. “Daisy. No one else is coming in.”

“That’s not what I’m worried about.”

“Then what are you worried about?”

I rolled closer to him. “How did whoever killed Olaf find that opening?”

He thought for a moment. “I don’t have a good answer for that,” he admitted.

“I mean, you couldn’t just walk into our yard and see it,” I said. “It wasn’t visible. You would’ve had to know it was there.”

He nodded. “Yeah, suppose so.”

“The only people who could’ve known about it were the owners before us,” I said slowly.

“Or the owners before them…”

I sat up straight. “So it has to be one of them.”

Jake looked dubious. “I don’t know about that.”

“How could it not?” I asked, smacking the pillow. “No one else would’ve known.”

“You’re assuming two things,” Jake said. “One, that the previous owners knew about the opening. We’ve lived here for six months and didn’t know about it, so there’s no guarantee that they knew, either. And, two—which is a far bigger leap—that one of the previous owners had reason to kill Olaf and dump him here to make
you
look bad.” He raised an eyebrow. “That isn’t just a leap, Daisy. That’s like jumping across the Grand Canyon.”

My excitement deflated like a popped balloon. He was right, of course. About both things. We’d met the previous owner, a lovely older woman who’d lived in the house for a couple of years before deciding to follow her son and his family to Arizona. I was fairly certain she wasn’t even in Minnesota anymore; and, even if she was, she didn’t seem like the person who would kill someone and then drag them through the snow and into a hidden coal chute.

I sighed. “Yeah. Probably.”

He pulled me toward him. “You’re obsessing way too much over this, honey. You need to let it go.”

“What?” I stared at him. “How?” Telling me to let it go was like asking me to climb Mt. Everest.

I couldn’t do it.

He laughed. “Look, I’m aware that you tend to hold onto things and hyper-focus. But there’s nothing you can do here. It’s over and done with. You said the detective told you we were cleared, which was never really in doubt, anyway. But she stated it, so now it’s a fact.” He wrapped his arms tightly around me. “We’re safe. We’re fine. There’s nothing else to do, except finish with the rest of the cinder blocks tomorrow. Which I’ll do. I promise.”

He was right. Again. We weren’t facing the threat of arrest. We were safe. The kids were safe. The opening was on its way to being sealed up for good.

I pressed into him. I needed to let it go, to relax and be satisfied that the police were going to take care of it.

I closed my eyes, prepared to do just that the next day.