Palindrome

by E. Z. Rinsky

  We stop walking for a moment as the cabin comes into view. No question now. This is where it happened.

  It’s a one-­story affair: dark brown, rotting logs stacked Lincoln style. A crumbling brick chimney protrudes from one end like it’s trying to escape from whatever’s inside. A fallen branch from one of the surrounding pine trees is still lying on the shingled roof. I squint up at where the branch must have broken off, from a towering Douglas whose base is just ten feet from the north wall of the cabin. Probably lightning.

  We abandon the muddy driveway, which continues around to the back of the house, and head for what used to be the front door, now just an empty frame containing a portrait of deep black. Clumps of wild grass, weeds and pine needles crunch beneath our feet like breaking glass. Rotting wood steps lead up to a porch and empty doorframe.

  I lick my lips. “Go in?” I ask. “Or maybe, you know, comb the exterior a bit.”

  In response, Courtney only rummages in his bag for a penlight, then steps inside. I follow.

  We enter a dark, narrow hallway. The air is wet and smells moldy. Walls are wet wood that peel away when I touch them. We don’t even bother looking for a light switch. On our right is a coat closet, which Courtney opens, flashlight clenched between his teeth. Totally empty besides a few rusty wire hangers.

  Courtney pokes his head in and inspects the corners of the closet. With an outdated digital camera, he takes a few pictures that I can’t imagine him ever needing. I shift my weight back and forth anxiously and avoid thinking about where we are. Rotting, moldy, evil smells: the scent of death.

  “See anything?” I ask.

  “No.” He pulls his head out. “Let’s keep going.”

  The hallway opens into a living room badly in need of some interior decorating. A little light streams in through two dusty windows on the wall opposite us. To the left is an open door, behind which I can see a toilet gone red with rust. The room smells rank and mildewed. Water drips from the ceiling; in fact there’s light coming in from a hole in the roof as well. On the floor of the living room is a soaked, dirt-­encrusted mat. Beside it are two metal foldout chairs. There’s a bookcase in the corner that’s totally empty, save a mess of spiderwebs. The most outstanding feature of the room is a towering pyramid of empty beer bottles, stacked to nearly my height. I pull one out carefully and inspect the label: Black Lab stout. Never heard of it. But all hundred-­some bottles are the same. Black Lab stout. A smiling black dog bares his tongue a hundred times over.

  Once my eyes adjust to the dim light, I notice that the floor is coated in wet cigarette butts.

  “Think the cops were drinking and smoking when they confiscated everything here for evidence?” I ask.

  “I’d wager that’s from local teens. Like that woman said. Everyone knows the story. They probably hung out here on Halloween for a scare. Or came here to make out . . . before they started hearing voices and someone cut up a dog, anyways.”

  There are two doors on the wall opposite the bathroom. I have to throw my shoulder into the rotting wood to open the first. There’s a yellowing mattress on an otherwise bare floor. Something jumps out of the mattress.

  I scream.

  Courtney rushes in behind me, just in time to see the squirrel leap through one of the empty window frames.

  “Little tense?” Courtney asks.

  “Little.”

  We probe the rest of the square bedroom, Courtney going down on his hands and knees to pull the mattress across the room to check what’s underneath. Nothing but mattress stuffing.

  “Think this was Silas’s bed?” I ask.

  Courtney is combing over the surface now with a black light and tweezers.

  “No hairs,” he mutters.

  “It’s been five years.”

  “Still. Stuff doesn’t just disappear.”

  “He was also bald in all the pictures we saw, remember? Tattoos all over his skull. Besides, we’re not investigating the murder, champ. Just trying to figure out where that sick fuck stashed this tape.”

  “And in order to do that,” Courtney says, rising to his feet and returning the black light to his bag, “we’re going to have to get in his head. Unfortunately, we know almost nothing about the guy. So he turns himself in, okay. What does he do with this tape? Keep it on him? Bury it to retrieve later? Destroy it?”

  I stare out the empty window pane. Conifers retreating to eternity, all shrouded in a light drizzle. A sea of tightly packed and drenched pinecones and pine needles.

  “If he buried it, we have no chance,” I say.

  “Agreed.”

  We leave the bedroom, and I slam my shoulder into the second moldy door off the living room. This room is slightly bigger. Another decaying mattress in the corner, a fireplace and a small kitchenette: propane stove on a metal stool, rusty steel sink, two pans hanging from hooks on the wall. There’s also a white minifridge, which Courtney opens. Mercifully empty; if someone had left a tuna casserole behind, we’d need hazmat suits to stay in here.

  I try the faucet, and there’s a hiss of air, then gurgling and finally an ejaculation of freezing water.

  Courtney is kneeling at the fireplace, combing through a pile of black ash with what looks like a very fine paintbrush.

  “You think there hasn’t been a fire in there since Silas?”

  “No way to tell really. Ash doesn’t age. Looks the same the day it’s burned as it does a hundred years later. This is all soaked through from water coming down the chimney.” Courtney stops. He quickly fumbles in his pack for a magnifying glass and a pair of tweezers, then bends down until he’s practically kissing the pile of black charcoal.

  “What is it, Courtney?” I ask.

  He doesn’t respond, just picks carefully through his pile. I shiver and zip my windbreaker up as high as it will go.

  Courtney finally extracts something with his tweezers and stands up, examining it in the glow of his flashlight. Then he grins.

  “Take a look at that, Frank,” he says proudly.

  I squint. It is nothing; a strand of charred white material a quarter the length of a fingernail.

  “Congrats, you’ve cracked the case,” I say, rolling my eyes.

  “You know what that is?”

  “A scale model of your prick?”

  “I believe”—­Courtney inspects it again with his magnifying glass—­“that this is bone.”

  My stomach does a little somersault.

  “Bone?” I stare at the little sprig. “How the hell can you tell?”

  He tugs it a bit with his tweezers.

  “You make a really hot fire, let it burn for hours, it looks like the bone has been consumed, but you’re wrong. Because bone is surprisingly hard to burn.”

  “Okay.” I grimace. “So it’s bone. Whose?”

  I pull my jacket tighter around my collar. The rain is picking up outside.

  “Not Savannah’s, since she was totally intact,” Courtney says, dropping the alleged bone into a small Ziploc bag and stashing it in his kit. “I’ll bet it belongs to that dog.”

  I rub my cheeks to warm them up. “Those teenagers must have been having some pretty wild parties.”

  Courtney traces his thin jawline, doesn’t seem to hear me. “What if someone else was here looking for the tape? Scared the locals off by killing that dog?”

  I say nothing.

  “Pure speculation.” I shiver. “Let’s get out of here.”

  “Almost done,” he replies, zipping up his bag and walking back into the living room. “Gotta check the basement.”

  There’s no descending stairway or trapdoor to the basement inside the house, so we check the back to see if there’s an exterior staircase.

  There’s more shit behind the cabin than I expected. It’s a junkyard.

  Two ancient pickup trucks d
evoured by rust, both half-­buried in the wet ground and stripped down to their skeletons. Maybe they belonged to Silas? From the looks of it, they were here well before he ever showed up.

  There’s what looks like a disassembled, rusty oven covered in mud; coils of wire; cracked ceramic plant pots just filled with dirt; a few shredded rubber tires; an old coffee machine; a pile of yellowed, soaked paper; and more empty Black Lab beer bottles.

  About twenty feet from the back door, there’s a wooden shed about six foot square, composed of vertical two-­by-­fours. A thin pole runs through the roof of the shed, up about twenty-­five feet. We wade through the trash to see it up close. It takes Courtney a moment to figure out what it is:

  “Solar panels up there, and there must be a generator inside.”

  “Let’s find out for sure,” I say and grab my flathead screwdriver from my backpack. I wedge it between two of the wet boards and pry one loose easily; nails glide out of their rotting homes like warm knives from year-­old butter. Courtney shines his penlight into the chasm.

  “I was right,” he says, not bragging. Just stating. “Still running too.”

  “Think Silas put it in?” I ask.

  “Guess so.” Courtney shrugs. “Maybe there’s no power lines out here.”

  I pry out two more boards with my latex-­gloved hands and poke my head into the shed. The air in here is still and heavy. In the light, I make out something that looks like a giant car battery. And sure enough, a little red light is flickering.

  “This looks like a pretty advanced battery,” Courtney says, shoving his own head in after I’m done looking. “Storing solar power for literal rainy days is fairly new technology. Quite pricey. Silas must have really needed dependable power for whatever he was doing.”

  “Tattooing?” I ask.

  Courtney just clicks his tongue and makes a sound like hrmph. Then we abandon the shed and walk back to the cabin. My hands are numb from cold; the latex gloves aren’t helping much in that arena.

  The basement is the only room that hasn’t been overrun by teenagers and other thrill-­seeking visitors. We know this because the entrance has been sealed, presumably by the cops. At least a foot of thick cement has been poured over the doors and surrounding area. That’s a new one.

  From what I can tell, it used to be one of those two-­doored entrances that protrudes from the ground at an angle—­the kind that usually opens to a descending staircase. We’ve been referring to the area beneath the house as a cellar or basement, but it’s clear that the more appropriate term might be bunker.

  Something about the cement looks off. I spent a summer working construction in high school—­mixed enough buckets of cement to know the way this material is catching the dying daylight isn’t normal. While Courtney snaps pictures of the cement-­sealed entrance from every conceivable angle, I kneel down to inspect it.

  “Court, you have a magnifying glass?” I ask.

  He removes one from his bag and hands it to me. Then squats down next to me and raps a knuckle against the grey cement coating.

  “Still hard?” I ask.

  He blushes and returns his hand to his pocket. Just watches me in silence as I get down on my stomach for a closer look at the grain of the material.

  “You ever heard of cops sealing a crime scene like this?” I ask.

  “No,” Courtney says. “Locals must have really been defiling this place. They didn’t want anyone messing around down here, ever. Don’t know why they didn’t just put a padlock on the door. What about trying to dig around the door, Frank? The ground is soft from the rain, and if the foundation down there is soft, rotting wood—­”

  “It’s not,” I say. “There’s concrete that extends around the perimeter of the house a few inches under the dirt.” I scoop some mud away with my gloved hand to show him. “Cement foundation.”

  “I guess we’ll need a jackhammer, then,” he says.

  “Well that’s just it,” I sigh, once I’ve confirmed my initial suspicion. “A jackhammer wouldn’t do it. It’s not pure cement. It’s mixed with some sort of metal alloy. This stuff won’t crumble.”

  Courtney stands up and tries to rub the mud off the knees of his skinny blue jeans but succeeds only in spreading it around into a chocolatey-­looking mess.

  “So?” he asks.

  “I think we’d need an industrial-­strength waterjet saw to blast through,” I say, grunting as I rise to my feet. “Would cost upwards of ten grand, plus we’d need a truck or big van to carry it up that driveway.”

  Courtney stares at the bunker, which looks built to withstand a direct impact from a barrage of missiles.

  “It would take a full day, at least, and obviously we’d need more cash,” I say.

  Courtney’s face is truly pained.

  “What do you think?” he asks. “Do we need to get in there? We have tons of pictures in the police file.”

  I bite my lip. I definitely don’t want to get in there. Tough to separate those two. The bottom of the grey sun flirts with the upper tips of the tallest pines. Icy droplets sting my cheeks. I can’t help imagining that Savannah’s body, impossibly, is still down there, immaculately preserved.

  BACK IN THE Honda, I turn on the ignition just to warm up. Unspeakable relief just at putting a mere driveway length between me and that house. Courtney seems emotionally drained too. Feels like we were looking around that cabin for a lot longer than two hours.

  I wasn’t getting reception at the cabin, but back in the car, my phone tells me I have a missed call from Orange. I get the feeling he’s gonna be hassling us pretty regularly for updates. I’ll let him sweat it out a bit.

  Instead I use my one bar of ser­vice to call Greta. Need to show her some progress and ask for money for the water saw. Five rings, then a generic message. I hang up.

  “No dice,” I say.

  Courtney flares his nostrils.

  “Leave a message!” he says once it’s obviously too late. “It looks professional.”

  “Nobody leaves messages anymore. If you’d owned a phone in the last decade, you’d know that.”

  The windshield starts steaming up a little. I feel a weariness in my bones, a tension in my neck and back that I haven’t felt in a long time.

  “How you feeling about all this?” I ask Courtney.

  He blinks a few times, pushes a long breath out through his chapped lips. “I’ve never dealt with anything like this. A girl killed, you know. Your dream . . .”

  I shift uncomfortably in my car seat.

  My phone starts vibrating. Blocked number. A little adrenaline shoots up from my gut, my chest tightens. I answer it on speakerphone.

  “Did you find it?” Greta’s voice is raspy and strained, tingling with desperation.

  Courtney stares at the phone in disgust, raises an eyebrow and shoots me a look like wow.

  “It’s only been two days.” I try to stifle a nervous laugh. “I’m calling to ask you for cash for an expense. The cellar door to the cabin is sealed up real good. We’ll need around ten thousand for a waterjet saw to bust in there. We figure there’s, well, not a good chance Silas stashed it down there, but we gotta have a look around.”

  We can hear her breathing heavily into the phone. Impossible not to think of sex; what she’d sound like as I brought her closer and closer to orgasm. I try to force the thought from my mind.

  “You don’t have to go down there,” she finally says. “It’s not down there.”

  Courtney is grinding his teeth, looking at me like where did you find this lady?

  “How do you know?” I ask, throat dry.

  “Because I went down there myself to look.”

  “Before it was sealed up?”

  She lets my stupid question hang in the airwaves for a moment, punishing me by forcing me to replay it in my head a ­couple times.<
br />
  “I didn’t even know anyone sealed it up,” she says. “I went there shortly after the trial.”

  “But maybe you missed it—­”

  “You need to ask Silas,” she says, her voice firming up like tofu in the fryer. “He’s the only one who knows where it is.”

  Courtney shakes his head, then takes a deep breath and leans over the phone.

  “Hi Greta. This is Courtney Lavagnino, the tracker working with Frank on this project. I’m just wondering why you wouldn’t tell Frank that you’d already been in this cabin, and already searched the basement. You could have saved us some time.”

  “I didn’t think it was pertinent.”

  We exchange a look of disbelief.

  “Well, with all due respect, ma’am,” Courtney says, “we’ll decide what’s pertinent and what’s not. Now, is there anything else you know that you think might help us find this tape for you?”

  Again she lets us suffer in silence. I’m breathing harder than I would like. I turn off the heat, roll down my window and suck down some fresh Maine air.

  “I found a stack of blank, unused cassette tapes down there,” she says. “The police must have seen them but just left them there.”

  Courtney tugs at an eyelash. “So then—­”

  “The tape exists,” Greta practically growls.

  How do I not have bourbon? Next grocery store we drive past, I’m pulling over.

  “And only Silas knows where it is.”

  “I understand that—­” Courtney starts, but she’s already hung up.

  He stares at me.

  “Quite a little ray of sunshine, isn’t she?” I smile weakly.

  He shakes his head, stunned, speechless.

  “You should see her in person though,” I add. “Looks like an angel.”

  I throw the car into gear and, after spinning in mud, catch some traction and ease out onto the empty two-­lane highway.

  “Where to now?” Courtney asks softly. He seems almost hurt by that interaction.