"I heard you."
"Were you eavesdropping?"
"I was listening. What you said was a lot of crap."
"Brucie!"
"He's out there, Mom, and I'm going to keep on looking for him until I find him." He tried to stare her down, but his eyes filled. She got up and took her empty cup to the sink. She came back and bent and kissed the side of his forehead.
"Okay. Keep looking, then, if that makes you feel better. Got to go to work, pal. Don't forget to lock up. And... good luck."
They had bought Baron for him for his third birthday, a small red hairy puppy that charged into his legs, knocked him down and licked his face. From small wriggling pup to big red setter they had grown up together. His father said the house was no place for a dog. But Baron had always slept at the foot of Bruce's bed. Always. It was the established order of things.
2-17
What if a nightmare woke you up and he wasn't there? And who was always waiting for the school bus, and knew exactly when it would arrive?
He dumped out what was left of the eggs and rinsed his plate off and put it in the dishwasher with his milk glass. He checked the doors to be sure they were locked and went into the carport. The front wheel of his bike looked mushy and he checked and found it was down to forty-five pounds. He pumped it back up to sixty-five. It was going to be one hot day.
The sky was glassy gray without a distinct cloud, and the sun seemed to fill half of it. He had divided his known world into sectors, each big enough to take a full day to search.
Today he would cover one of the furthest-away areas, over the other side of Lakemore, out toward the county line, chain-locking the bike to trees when he went out across the fields, looking on every side, counting his steps, stopping and yelling, "BARR RUN, BARR RUN, BARR RUN," three times after each fifty steps, then listening to see if he heard an answering yelp. The dog could be caught up on something and wasting away, dying of thirst, broken leg, some terrible thing.
By noon according to his Hagar wristwatch, Bruce Swain was walking along a muddy dirt road that ran parallel to the state road. His bicycle was chained to a curve-warning sign not far beyond the County Line Motel. He thought he probably ought to go back home and make sandwiches, but it seemed like a very long way there and back again, maybe more than twelve miles in the heat. Anyway, he hadn't been very hungry lately. When you had turned ten you weren't like some little kid that starts whining when he doesn't eat on time.
He came to a place where a house had burned down a long time before. The stone foundation was falling into where the cellar had been, and there were trees growing in the cellar as big around as his leg. The old barn was still standing, most of it. Part of the roof had fallen in. First he searched the cellar area, calling the dog every few minutes. Then he thought he should try the barn, because a sick or injured dog might seek shelter in there. It was a shadowy place, a home for bats and rats and things that slithered and skittered. No luck. He went out behind the barn and in a few moments he became aware of a very faint but sickening smell.
He began moving this way and that, tracking it down. There was a fitful breeze. At times he could not smell it at all. But then it got stronger and stronger as it led him to a small open structure with a warped shingled roof. It seemed to have a floor too small for it, and then he realized that it was the old well for the farm, and somebody had put old boards across the low stone combing, and the storm had blown a couple of them off.
There was room for a dog to fall in. He leaned over and snuffed the smell that came up from the black depth, and it drove him back with an almost physical impact. He coughed and gagged, and went away to sit on the trunk of a fallen tree, thirty feet upwind from the well. He knew it was the smell of something long dead. Eleven days was enough time. Baron had never roamed this far from home.
"It isn't Baron," he said aloud, and his voice sounded small and unsure in the silence of the dead farm. The dog could have chased something which darted into the well. A barn rat. The dog would fall to the bottom and die and the damn rat would run away, squealing its rat-laugh.
"Damn bastard rat," he said, feeling the tickle of a tear on his face, a shameful weakness.
He knew he was going to have to see down there. So, holding his breath, he took away one board at a time. But when he tried to see the bottom, there wasn't enough light. The well roof overhead kept it too shaded. He found a stone the size of a peach and tossed it in. As he listened for the sound, he forgot to keep breathing through his mouth. He breathed once through his nose and nearly threw up. The noise puzzled him. It wasn't the ka-plunk sound of falling into water, and it wasn't a stone-on-stone sound, and it wasn't a damp kind of thud. It was a metallic sound. In two parts. Bang-clatter.
So there had to be some way to get some light down there.
He looked around, thought for a while and then went trotting through the heat, across the fields, to the motel.
A tall man was sitting on his heels in the shade of the roof over the motel walkway, using a small noisy compressor to operate a spray gun. He had newspapers spread out, and he was spraying some old wicker furniture a new bright brave blue. When he noticed Bruce he reached and turned off the compressor and smiled and said, "Rent you a nice room, buddy?"
"No, thanks. I'm Bruce Swain. We live over next to the Center. What I'm doing, I'm looking for Baron, my red setter.
He's been gone eleven days."
The man stood up, wincing as he straightened his long legs.
He shook hands and said, "I'm Fred Moon. Eleven days makes it pretty serious, huh? You walk here?"
"No. I got my bike chained down the road there."
"Your daddy wouldn't be Arden Swain, the optometrist?"
"That's my uncle. My dad works for the city. His name is Dale."
"Oh sure, I know him. I mean I know who he is, not like we're old pals or anything. If you're asking me if I saw any red setter eleven days ago, I don't think so."
"No. What I mean, I think I found him. I mean I'm kind of afraid I found him. Over there across that other road, way over."
"You think you found him? Let's go inside and get a cold one and talk this thing over, Bruce."
After he had taken his first long swallows of icy cola, Bruce explained about the terrible stink and not being able to see down in there.
"First I got to see that it's him, and after that I'll talk to my dad about getting him up out of there and burying him back home where he belongs. Maybe it's a raccoon or a fox or a big rabbit or something like that."
"Now, a flashlight might not work, just aiming it straight down there," Mr. Moon said, 'because in old wells what you get a lot of the time is a bunch of brush and vines growing out of the walls, out of the cracks between the old stones. Now, right here I've got this big old mother of a flashlight, and we can tie it on some long string, turn it on, and lower it down there. This lens part tips down a little, and the handle on top makes it perfect for the job."
"I can do it and bring the flashlight back, Mr. Moon."
"You're big enough to call me Fred like everybody else, Bruce. Now, the stink is real bad?"
"It's really terrible. I nearly threw up."
"Okay, we'll take a couple of Peggy's dish towels here, and this little bottle I'll fill with rubbing alcohol, and when we get to the well, we soak a little into the towel and tie it around our noses and mouths."
"You really don't have to come along."
Fred Moon stared at him, then finished his soft drink and put the bottle on the counter. He nodded at Bruce.
"You're afraid it will be your dog, and then you'll do a lot of crying and carrying on and you don't want anybody watching you."
"I... I guess so."
"If you didn't cry and carry on, you wouldn't be normal, and besides, I won't watch. Let me go in the office and tell Peggy where we're going. Then, if it is your dog, what we'll do, we'll put your bike in the pickup and take it on home. Will anybody be there?"
"No.
"
"So we'll leave off the bike and I'll drop you at City Hall.
Now we've got everything organized. We forget anything?"
"I don't think so."
Fifteen minutes later they reached the well and got the towels in place. Fred Moon lifted the edge of his and leaned over the well and said, "Hoooeeee! That is one powerful smell."
He tied the cord to the flashlight and turned it on and began to lower it slowly.
"Whatever's down there is going to look pretty sorry," he said.
"I know," the boy said.
"It's okay."
There was a lot of brush growing out between the stones of the sides. The light twisted slowly around and back, lighting a small portion of the old stones. It went down so far Fred began to wonder if he should have brought more cord. Then it touched something and tilted. He raised it free and let it slowly turn, let it touch an aluminum train case, a rotting hand and wrist, and then the ghastly face upturned.
The cord slipped out of his slack hand, and the light fell and tipped on its side, still burning in a few inches of water. Fred Moon scrambled back and turned and tore the towel off and threw up. Moments later, he heard the boy throw up. He wiped his sour mouth with the towel and went to the boy and said, "I guess neither one of us is cut out for this line of work."
"At least it... wasn't Baron," the boy said. That face down there was imprinted on his brain so vividly he could still see it no matter where he looked. And he knew he would never forget it, no matter how long he might live.
Carolyn Pennymark was stretched out on her bed, head propped up, the phone wedged between shoulder and jaw.
"Hey, Marty? Little Red Roving Hood here. The rain quit and I have been up and down and around, and if there is anything else here, nobody else is going to find it either, so I better come in."
"Is that so? Really scoured it, huh? What did you come up with?"
"Just dumb junk. A rumor one of the computer geniuses is making it with one of the choir Angels, but it turns out she's the age of consent, so that's nothing even if I chased it down. Also, the old man is deep into Alzheimer's, too far gone to ever make another appearance anywhere. It seems that John Tinker Meadows has a little history of messing around, but it has been nicely covered up in the past. There's talk they may put up a big medical school and hospital and so on, but it wouldn't make very exciting copy."
"So you want to head for the barn?"
"That's about it. I'm getting tired of the chimes."
"You sure it's time to come back?"
"Marty, what's wrong with you? Don't you trust me to tell you when a story is dead?"
"Certainly, doll. You know it's over when it's over. You can figure out the best way back and get started whenever."
Thanks."
"Oh, by the way. It just came in over the wire a couple of minutes ago, some kid found a female body maybe dead three months in the bottom of a well out there west of Lakemore.
But it's probably nothing, right?"
"Why, you miserable, rotten son of a bitch. You knew that and you let me keep talking! Goodbye, Marty baby."
She slammed the phone down and ran out of the room toward the stairs.
Fourteen As soon as the bottom of the well had been so brightly floodlighted the long ladder could be placed without touching the body or the luggage, two men from the State Bureau of Investigation went down to the bottom, wearing masks, and cut away the brush from the sides of the shaft as they went down. Once at the bottom, they took pictures of the body from every possible angle before slipping it carefully into a rubberized zippered body bag. The body bag was placed at an angle into a large mesh bag shaped somewhat like a hammock, and men up at ground level hoisted it slowly up the shaft, with one of the technicians following it up the ladder, keeping it from bumping the sides or the ladder. Once the body was up at ground level, it was placed in a hinged metal box with a rubber gasket which made it airtight.
When the body box had been eased into the ambulance, the mesh bag was lowered again and brought up with the luggage which had been found resting on and against the body. There was an aluminum train case, two small suitcases and a portable typewriter. These items were placed in the ambulance as well, with every care taken to avoid smudging any fingerprints which might be on them, especially on the train case and the typewriter case.
The ambulance then proceeded to the city, sixty miles southeast of Lakemore, and drove to the basement entrance to the Southern Memorial Hospital, where they put the sealed container on a cart and rolled it to that section of the City Morgue equipped for the performance of autopsies.
The autopsy was begun at eight o'clock on the evening of the day the body was discovered, and was performed by Dr. George Ludeker, the Medical Examiner, assisted by Dr. Everett Johnson. Dr. Ludeker dictated each step of the procedure as it progressed. Dr. Johnson, from time to time, took pictures of the body for possible use in the investigation into the death.
The body was removed from both containers and placed face up on the dissection table. The clothing was soaked, soiled and rotting. There was a thin yellow blouse, a white brassiere, a dark blue cotton skirt, one white sandal with a medium heel.
There was a gold chain around the neck, a Timex digital watch on the left wrist, a wedding band and a ring with a small diamond on the third finger, left hand, and a white metal ring containing a red stone on the index finger of the right hand.
When all items had been removed from the body it was subjected to close examination for distinguishing marks and characteristics. It was a female, one hundred and fifty-five centimeters in height, small-boned, fair complexion, pale blonde hair, impossible to determine what color the eyes had been. Approximately forty percent of the little finger on the right hand missing, with scar tissue indicating it had happened a long time ago. Decedent's age estimated to be between twenty and forty years.
Left side of face badly damaged, but impossible to tell if it was an injury prior to death or the result of the fall into the well. The body, in general, was in an advanced stage of decomposition, and so there was difficulty in determining what trauma had caused the death if, indeed, death had come as the result of an injury. Dr. Ludeker noted for the record that the body was not as badly decomposed as one might anticipate for a body which had been out of doors in the summer months at this latitude. Dr. Johnson said that the temperature at the bottom of a deep well might stay at about fifty-four degrees Fahrenheit, and apparently the well had been covered until the recent storm blew some of the boards off the top of it. That kept the body from the flies and the consequent destruction by maggots.
They were on close examination able to detect the existence of an appendix scar, and what had been a ridge of scar tissue across the top of the left foot. As was the practice, Dr. Ludeker examined the arms and legs carefully to determine whether he thought he might through tissue examination find any trace of needle tracks indicating some possibility of addiction or diabetes. But the condition of the tissues made any such search useless.
The body was then opened and the organs of the abdomen and chest examined in methodical fashion. They proved to be in normal condition, allowing for the state of decomposition and the resultant postmortem changes. There had been such degeneration of the soft tissues of the body it was impossible to determine whether the woman had been the victim of a sexual assault prior to death. The heart and the brain showed on close examination no indications of trauma. Small tissue samples from the reasonably stabilized areas of various organs were labeled and set aside for laboratory analysis.
It was not until they dissected the neck that they began to suspect a possible cause of death. They discovered that the crico id cartilage, which is the ringlike structure of cartilage below the thyroid, was broken in two places. Neither doctor had ever observed this injury in a person as young as the decedent appeared to be. In the young the crico id has enough elasticity to be able to withstand a considerable pressure. Once the crico id has been brok
en, has been dented inward like a dent in a Ping-Pong ball, the victim will die of strangulation in a very few minutes. In a body recently smothered or strangled it is possible to find pinpoint hemorrhages in the whites of the eyes, far back under the lids. But she had been too long dead to provide this confirmation. Closeup color photographs were taken by Dr. Johnson of the broken crico id and the tissues of the throat. In re-examining the tissues of the throat they could not find any evidence of the way the force had been used to break the crico id They reassembled the body, using large curved needles and a coarse thread rather than the customary staples to hold the edges of the incisions together, placed it in the metal case and rolled it on a stretcher into the cold room where the attendant would place it in storage and label the locker door.
After they had gone into the annex and showered and changed, they were surprised to find Lieutenant Coombs and Sergeant Slovik of the State Bureau of Investigation in the waiting room. It was quarter to midnight.
John D MacDonald - One More Sunday Page 27
